As much as I believe in practice and hard work overcoming anything, that isn't the entire story.
Practicing can't hurt but you have to know what you're trying to achieve. It's like that thread about 'how good could someone get on their own' that came up a few weeks ago.
A top player from my area breaks the balls as well as anyone I've seen shy of SVB. Minimal movement, just a slight rise from the waist up with no leg movement at all. Looks like a firm stop shot. Yet break after break the cue ball pops dead and he explodes the rack with stunning effectiveness. He has told me he isn't 'trying' to break well, in his words 'he just knows how to hit it'. He can do this on demand.
Others always say things like "You have to practice to learn to do that" and "You know how many hours he has practiced that break?" But I *DO* know how many hours he's practiced: About zero. He played seriously for a few years and probably experimented with his stance or technique a few times, I'm not saying he hasn't thought about it at all. But he doesn't own a breakrak, he never put in an hour a day for 3 months or anything like that. He just figured out what works and remembered how to do it.
Now he's a very gifted individual and for most of us the right answer is the breakrak and we can give ourselves an edge in terms of commitment and hard work. But sometimes I think we can make things more complicated than they need to be. If we feel like we need to struggle for years to learn to hit a rack of balls then we are handicapping ourselves by telling ourselves that we haven't put in enough practice yet and 'just a few more years' and we'll figure it out. Whereas there are 17 year olds across the world that simply watch a few videos of SVB and say "OK, I'll just do that" and put it together through the course of their next few weeks of play.
I need to work on my break so these words are from my heart. I'm prepared to practice, but I want to find a way that makes sense and gets the results I want to see in days and weeks, not in months and years with a bunch of limiting beliefs about what's possible.