Getting Good

I think it is inherently virtuous to get good at things: We have come into possession of these bodies and minds, and use them to fullest of their abilities honors our own existence.

This morning I read a piece from Moonwalking with Einstein (a book on the art of memory), that made me think deeply about the notion of practice. Now I am struggling to reconcile two notions: that quality of practice or that quantity of practice matters more.
The author, Joshua Foer, flatlines in his pursuit of memory skills at a point he calls the "OK Plateau." A person  goes through three different states of practice when learning a new skill

1. The cognitive stage - where you learn strategies and actively think about putting them to work
2. The associative stage - where you become more efficient at using the strategies
3. The autonomous stage - where you are no longer thinking actively, and "running on autopilot"

Foer mentions psychological studies that postulate that once a person has gotten good enough at a task, they slip into an autonomous stage, and stop actively trying to get better. Thus, if one could stay in the cognitive phase, there would be no limit on how good a person could get.
Further, Foer mentions that the amount of practice only loosely correlates with skill, and that the quality of practice matters much more.

But this seems in opposition to the notion of 10,000 hours, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. The idea is, basically, it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve a master level in something.
Let me first say, I have not read Outliers, so I cannot claim a full understanding of any ideas that Gladwell put forth in his book. But I wanted to mention it because I was so disheartened when I learned of this statistic, and figured that my idea of becoming a renaissance man was potentially unattainable, because of the time constraints on every aspect of life I wished to get good at.
Foer has shed a slim beam of hope on my dream. The notion that through active concentration on improvement, one can compress the time necessary for mastery, suggests that as long as I let my natural curiosity guide me towards deeper understanding of the things I want to get good at, as long as I challenge myself with new tasks that are increasing in difficulty, I can master everything I want to get good at.