Only Perfect Practice Makes Perfect Skill

I was practicing in a bunker down in Texas and this good old boy with a big hat stopped to watch. The first shot he saw me hit went in the hole. He said, “You got 50 bucks if you knock the next one in.” I holed the next one. Then he says, “You got $100 if you hole the next one.” In it went for three in a row. As he peeled off the bills he said, “Boy, I’ve never seen anyone so lucky in my life.” And I shot back, “Well, the harder I practice, the luckier I get.”
This is what golf legend Gary Player said in an interview in Golf Digest in 2002.
We’ve all perhaps read Malcolm Gladwell’s very popular “10,000 hours” theory — that you need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master a skill. And definitely everyone in India has heard about, in awe, the number of hours of practice a legend like Sachin Tendulkar put in even till his last test match. But why? Is there no easy way out when trying to muster (or master) a new skill?
There is a scientific reason why a new