I think the problem is the quality of the deliberation of "deliberate practice." There are metaskills, such as reason, logic, understanding of cause and effect, statistical analysis, etc. that effect the acquisition of all skills, partially through the method of improving the efficiency of memory. If you learn one skill that has five objects, consisting of two transformations of two of those objects into another two of those objects, and three relationships between those two resultant objects that result in the fifth object, you've just learned a complicated skill. But if you've learned how to find potential isomorphisms between those objects, transformations, and relationships and other objects, transformations, and relationships in the world through the use of reason, logic, understanding of cause and effect, and statistics, and how to vet them well, then each further discovery will immediately generate skills that weren't possessed before, and some of them may even be novel. Without the ability to recognize those isomorphisms, each skill would have to be learned separately, and remembered separately. It's like the difference between languages like Old English, where to pluralize a word or to create a possessive would require learning another word, and normalized languages like most of Modern English or the Romance languages where you can just apply a transformation to words that you already know. In the leap from Old English to Modern English, English speakers were given a gift of an expanded memory.

I hope that didn't sound like word salad.

Basically, if I had to get by on sheer memory, I'd be screwed, because mine is miserable. What I can do is reason to the same place under the same conditions often enough that my memory will eventually leap there out of habit. To get good results out of this requires a strong foundation that sadly both isn't formally taught or emphasized in our educational system (outside of mathematics and the hard sciences), just gleaned through the sheer effort of having to memorize an enormous amount of information. I don't deny that some genetically predetermined concentrations of proteins in the brain could give you a leg up on this, but I deny that any brain that has all of its pieces couldn't possibly outperform every other brain on this planet in any particular area.

I operate under the assumption that advances in reason will be made and distributed during millennia to come that will give the average 10 year old the equipment to understand within a day things that would have taken a person in the early 21st century a dozen lifetimes of what counts as "deliberate practice" now.

We invented language to spread information and ways to reason about that information, and it's worked. First we spoke it, then we wrote it, then we manufactured it, now we're almost bathing in it. If we manage not to 'splode ourselves within the next 100,000 years, we should be as advanced in reasoning over our current selves as our current selves are over who we were 20,000 years ago. Why 100,000? I'm assuming diminishing returns because of the discoveries that we sometimes make of walls like quantum physics, where we discover things that are even theoretically unknowable. Probably a primitive assumption:)

At this point in time, we jump to mystical theories of the undetectable secret superiority of the successful, after defining superiority as being successful (at the rate of gaining returns with practice), which is completely circular logic that discounts "deliberate practice" as a skill in itself.

The author shows that actual numbers bear this out.

</rant>

He's got a lot of other interesting articles about the dynamics of deliberate practice. Thanks for the link.