Deliberate practice and chess

My negotiations professor used to stress the importance of deliberate, reflective practice as a way of developing expertise.  One of the examples he used was of chess grandmasters.  It apparently takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve preeminence in chess.  But, it can't be any type of practice; it has to be deliberate and reflective.  That is why we had to keep a negotiations journal where we would reflect on our experience and make improvement plans. 

That's why I found this article from one of my favorite blogs interesting:
 http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/06/20/what-chess-tells-us-about-the-value-of-perception/. 

I dabbled in chess back in the day and was my high school's chess club president.  I won a few amateur tournaments in my ratings brackets, but my ELO rating never broke 1500, let alone approached the level of expert or master.  I believe part of the reason is because I enjoyed playing chess as a game, was pretty successful against players in my own chess club, and was satisfied with that.  I would sometimes try different openings, but I didn't record my games, seriously study chess strategy, or otherwise reflect on my performance.  As a result, I plateaued relatively quickly and thereafter made but little progress. 

Grandmasters, on the other hand, can recognize up to 10,000 common positions and know how to play them out, but if pieces are placed randomly on the board, they do no better at remembering the position of the pieces than non-players.  It is the recognition of past patterns and knowing how they fit into the broader context that gives world-class expertise in chess and many other fields. 
In other areas of my life where I have tried to apply deliberate, reflective practice, I have seen more rapid learning and less of a plateau effect.

Incidentally, I believe one reason personal journals in general can be a good idea is they can make life itself deliberate and reflective.  If you keep a journal, or even if you are just thinking about your goals, ask yourself: What do you want? What are you doing to accomplish it? How is that working for you? If results are not as you'd like, what might you do differently to achieve what you most desire?

Yep, this is sort of a non-sequitur for this blog, but I'm nothing if not varied in my interests, plus I wanted to write about something more upbeat than my current struggles.