It's not that deliberate practice isn't a big factor and very important. It's the idea that it's massively and overwhelmingly decisive. For example, this meta-

It's not that deliberate practice isn't a big factor and very important. It's the idea that it's massively and overwhelmingly decisive. For example, this meta-analysis of sports performance found that deliberate practice was important but not overwhelmingly so, accounting of 18% of performance on average. It seems like there is a lot of plasticity in human performance, and it may be the case that many of us can get pretty good at a lot of things, but there also appear to be many factors distinct from practice that make substantial contributions to performance. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691616635591 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/174569161663559...