Doing a lot is not enough. Being critical towards yourself, striving to do better, understand what is better, looking for and listening to feedback, those are as necessary.
"It is important to note that our study shows only that the amount and distribution of practice is related to the level of performance of adult musicians. In fact, many additional factors consistent with the skill-acquisition framework could attenuate the differences among our three groups. Sosniak (1985) found that international-level pianists had spent considerable efforts to seek out the very best musical teachers during their musical development. Furthermore, it is likely that an analysis of the detailed activities during practice alone would reveal qualitative differences between violinists at different advanced levels of performance (Gruson, 1988; Miklaszewski, 1989)."
But more recent research has demonstrated (though I don't know to what degree, nor how many other papers have validated the following findings) that "individual differences in accumulated amount of deliberate practice accounted for about one-third of the reliable variance in performance in chess and music, leaving the majority of the reliable variance unexplained and potentially explainable by other factors". From http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289614..., sorry for the paywall.
In the end, I think it's important to spend time searching and finding something you will be happy to do for the majority of your life. If you want to progress at your chosen field, thought out and well planned studying/practise is necessary, and will make you better, whether or not you end up becoming the accepted world best. And if you enjoy it, it won't matter how high you go.
