Practicing 10,000 hours is not enough “Deliberate Practice” makes the difference.

Achieving excellence.

The deliberate practice approach can be applied in many ways. From pinpointing tiny weaknesses and removing them to using broad application problems. Exposing weaknesses and eliminating them is the objective, year after year.

The second text exposes the details of the theory point form.

Thanks for the referral to this book Maurizio. Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performers-EverybodyElse

Here is the original article for a quick introduction to the topic: http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/21/magazines/fortune/talent_colvin.fortune/index4.htm

Traditional Instruction vs “Deliberate Practice” (Part 1) » light in the shadows: "Summary: “Science” just published (May 13, 2011) a fascinating article: Improved Learning in a Large Enrollment Physics Class, Louis Deslauriers, Ellen Schelew, and Carl Wieman
Carl is a Physics Noble prize winner, now working in science education. The article is on an experiment they did in physics education.
They waited until week 12 in a traditional lecture course, and then changed 1 week of class sessions. They used what they called “deliberate practice”, meaning: posing good application problems for students, letting them see if they could solve them individually, recording their answers with “clickers”, talking about their answers with 1-2 other students, and getting immediate feedback from the teacher.
With just 3 days of those changes, they had the following impact in the experimental groups:

attendance went up 20%
student engagement went up 100%
student performance on tests was better (2.5X)
when students were later asked if they liked these changes and thought they would learn more if they were used in the whole course, said in essence: “Of course!”"

Deliberate Practice – Where Self-reflection, Work Ethic and Ambition Meet

"take careful heed of what Colvin has to say, especially his first premise, the idea of stretching one’s skills. In education, there are clearly at least two areas to stretch students, those related to academics as well as those related to the work ethic arena.

In addition, Colvin’s final three premises, his ‘before the work,’ ‘during the work’ and ‘after the work’ components, are all highly relevant to the role of a teacher in the classroom. "

...By contrast, deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them.
The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they’re improved; then it’s on to the next aspect.”

Engaging in Deliberate Practice

Here are a few questions which may help:

1. What skills or competencies require further development?

2. What is the first and most crucial step to getting to desired action?

3. Come up with an effective action plan which will leads to expanding the comfort zones?

4. When will the action plan be implemented?

5. How will success be measured?

More references:

deliberate-practice

www.coachingmanagement.nl/The Making of an Expert.pdf (Harvard Business Review)

...To illustrate this point, let’s imagine you are learning to play golf for the first time. In the early phases, you try to understand the basic strokes and focus on avoiding gross mistakes (like driving the ball into another player). You practice on the putting green, hit balls at a driving range, and play rounds with others who are most likely novices like you. In a surprisingly short time (perhaps 50 hours), you will develop better control and your game will improve. From then on, you will work on your skills by driving and putting more balls and engaging in more games, until your strokes become automatic: You’ll think less about each shot and play more from intuition. Your golf game now is a social outing, in which you occasionally concentrate on your shot. From this point on, additional time on the course will not substantially improve your performance, which may remain at the same level for decades.
Why does this happen? You don’t improve because when you are playing a game, you get only a single chance to make a shot from any given location. You don’t get to figure out how you can correct mistakes. If you were allowed to take five to ten shots from the exact same location on the course, you would get more feedback... 

TheRoleOfDeliberatePracticeInChessExpertise2005.pdf