Expert
Kathy Sierra's post on How to be an expert simply reinforces the old advice: Practice!
Yet the research says that if we were willing to put in more hours, and to use those hours to practice the things that aren't so fun, we could become good. Great. Potentially brilliant. We need, as Restak refers to it, "a rage to master." That dedication to mastery drives the potential expert to focus on the most subtle aspects of performance, and to never be satisfied. There is always more to improve on, and they're willing to work on the less fun stuff.
And in this day and age, we have become so utterly obsessed with doing everything that we are not experts anymore: we coast around trying to do things as best as we can.
And that is why only a few obsessive and determined individuals actually made it.