Good at many things/Great at nothing... Is this a common problem?

[gholizad]

In takes a lot of effort to be a world class in any field. I play chess too and I consider myself a decent player. I have a friend who started playing chess seriously about the same time as me. We were going to the same school and we talked a lot about chess those days. He always wanted to take it to the next level but I prefered to focus on my studies and school stuff. He even took a couple of semesters off because he had tough tournaments at the time of final exams but I never did anything like that. Now he is an IM and I am just nothing but a decent above average player. I mean I could easily be much much better if I took his path but I did not want to. All I am saying is that, you can not expect to be a world class player unless you spend a whole lot of time and energy on it and it is way more difficult than it looks like.