Reddit reviews Peak: How to Master Almost Anything

First, you are basing it on the "10,000 hour rule" as popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. It is not the 1000 hour rule.

Second, the key to any practice is Deliberate Practice, which is a big topic - but the general key is to keep track of your progress, create metrics for improvement, track success and pattern analysis of your own behaviour, isolate and focus on specific tasks (ex. first clear time for a jungler), and develop techniques to combine complex manuevres or subjects into singular tasks for both better communication and better/faster decision making.

Third, Gladwell's book is mostly a pile of pop psychology garbage that skips through a more complex subject and makes a fucking mess of it - but adds a lot of feel-good examples so you feel like you are learning something. The far superior book on the subject, by the author of the white papers Gladwell based his book on, is called Peak: How to Master Almost Anything, by Anders Ericcson & Robert Pool. It was Ericcson's doctoral dissertation in the early 90's from which the '10000 hour rule' originates, although the pop psychology interpretation you and Gladwell are repeating is apparently a gross misinterpretation of his work.

TL;DR - "Playing" is not the same as "Practice". You can play a game for 100,000 hours and be trash at it competitively, you can practice a game for 10,000 hours and still be trash at it if you don't practice correctly (deliberate practice).

If your son is interested in taking this as far as possible, I would HIGHLY recommend reading this book: https://www.amazon.ca/Peak-How-Master-Almost-Anything/dp/0670068764

I'm almost done it myself and am applying a quantifiable deliberate practice training approach to improvement. I'd be happy to talk about some drills I'm using and planning to use in the near future, the spreadsheets I'm using to track my progress as well as other aspects of how to apply the lessons in Peak to sc2, something I've given a lot of thought to.

In either case, I wish you and your son GL and hope you both HF!