Effort shock: how the Karate Kid ruined the modern world
From my perspective, the training montage in Karate Kid demonstrated that it took a LOT of effort, not the little bit this article criticizes it for.  Two months of hard work, from sunrise to sunset, to develop muscle memory?  It's not the 10,000 hours required to become a world-class expert, but 600+ hours of intensive training is enough to see some pretty decent results.  The other movie he criticizes by name, Rocky, was similar.  Rocky had 2 months to train for his first fight, and he wasn't starting from scratch.It's hard to become a world-class expert at anything.  You need some combination of latent talent and many thousands of hours of training, hopefully with someone who really understands how to train you effectively.  But I don't think either Rocky or the Karate Kid greatly misrepresent the amount of effort it would take for an exceptionally talented individual, with a great trainer, to make the leaps they did.