How to be good at everything

I always enjoy looking back at random old scrap papers or notebook pages of mine.  You could see everything from simple scoreboards and notes about video games, to detailed plans for my own games, attempts to solve random math problems, personality investigations, game theory investigations, and more.  There was even a paper on which I wrote the things I believed necessary if you wanted to become good at everything...


I had a few key questions:  Can planned but unpracticed reaction approach the level of well trained reactions?  What requires practice and what can be done using knowledge or experiences with something similar?

In the way most 2D fighting games are designed now, most attacks on the ground are low hits with the exception of one or two slow high hits.  So, when your opponent's on the ground, you block low and then block high if you see a high hit coming, which can be difficult if you're relying on reactions alone.  You could practice to get better at reacting to your opponent's character's overheads.  My questions were: Could you get good at the skill of blocking overheads in general?  If you had the practice moving your control stick from a low guard to a high guard position on reaction to something on screen, then could you become good at it against any character on any 2D fighting game as long as you knew what to look for?  And, even farther than that, without any fighting game experience, could you take experience with reacting to things on a game screen along with a game plan of "block low, but block high if the opponent is in the air or you see an overhead coming" and a visual memory of what various overheads look like, and then execute this with little to no practice beforehand?

This point relates to developing a skill for blocking overheads in all games.  How much do skills carry over?  Having built up some skill in various rhythm games, I wondered if I would be able to easily pick up any new rhythm game that was of a similar style (i.e. hitting falling/rising notes when they reach a certain point on the screen).  How much did the game have to be changed before my skills with other rhythm games didn't matter that much?  A test of this was one of the motives behind the following video:


I figured that the most important thing was the ability to benefit from previous experiences that were similar along with possessing knowledge of how to play the game, or knowledge of a method to succeed, and use these to do reasonably well at anything new that you do.  And then you needed to be able to memorize things quickly, be it concepts, strategies, button presses...  You also had to be able to adjust, apply, react...

Finally, if you wanted to maintain skill in many things, you would need a good long term memory.  Now the question was, which of these things can you train on and improve in?  Could you improve on your ability to take a single specific skill (such as, Dance Dance Revolution skill), and apply your skill at that one thing to help you in other similar things (like Beatmania)?  Could you become more capable for doing things just based on knowledge and planning, rather than practice?  Could you learn how to improve your ability to learn?