Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

Exactly. There is a rule but I would venture that very few native English speakers know it or were taught it; it's learned implicitly instead. I only found out there was a rule because I stumbled across the phenomenon doing a computational linguistics project.

My broader point (which I made poorly) is that native levels of language proficiency require a mix of explicit and implicit learning. There are certainly explicit rules for verb conjugation and agreement. Some things can be learned either way, like adjective order. Others seem to be mostly implicit: I can't give you a general rule for why "I asked her to marry me and she agreed" sounds fine but *"I asked her to marry me and she concurred" sounds weird.

Teaching college students how to program my first year of grad school, I realized that it's not possible to make someone understand something. In a real sense, I could not teach them to program. Learning how to program is learning a new way of thinking, and there was no way I could force them to start thinking in this way. I was more trying to guide them to have many personal epiphanies - through a combination of socratic method style questions and giving them specific actions to try with the hope it would improve their mental model.

I figured out something very similar in flight school. When I did my instrument rating, I realized my instructor, Sean, wasn’t perfect. No pilot is. But, I believed he could pass an instrument check ride. I could not.

I decided that rather than figure out if everything he did was the best way or “worked for me”, I would just do my best Sean impression. I still had the opportunity to get even better by learning from other instructors or coming up with my own ideas. That could wait until after I got my rating.

He actually noticed. At the beginning of an early lesson he showed me his check routine during taxi. He flowed through all of the instruments and controls. The next flight, I did my best impression. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close. When I was done he told me no student had ever gone through the whole thing the next flight. Most don’t even try. Even the better students just grab a few things and end up with a routine close to his by the end of training.

It all ended up working. I passed my check ride with just about the legal minimum amount of training time.

Writing this all out and talking about what a great student I was feels pretty egotistical. Ironically, that’s the opposite of what this method is about. Just copy the closest person next to you who is better than you. They don’t even have to be that great. Then, find someone better, and copy them. Save breaking new ground for later in your journey.

I do something similar with guitar. I can teach chords and notes, but I can't teach you how to hold the strings down properly in the first place. "Go play with this until you make the notes every time without a buzzing sound" basically.