[jackschultz]

I played high level golf for a while and a lot of these articles forget the two main rules I've learned from it. The first is intense practice. This means devoting 100 percent to every repetition. This is obviously difficult because of, among other things, repetition is inherently boring. Luckily for golf, there are an infinite number of shots to practice, and working on all of them should break up the monotony. This leads into the second rule for practice, which is to vary what you work on. For golf, this means playing different shots from all different locations. Besides making it more interesting, it makes you go through the actual process that you would encounter on the course.

This generalizes to other activities easily. The best practice I've found comes from complete effort in game/competition like environments.

[jacques_chester]

In fairness to Ericsson and Gladwell, they didn't say "any old 10,000 hours will do". The basic hypothesis was, as you say, that it had to focused and deliberate.