The best piece of advice I can offer to start with is not to practice with a mirror. Mirrors give a distorted perspective on your pass practice. If you don't have a camera to practice with, find a way to angle your mirror downward on your hands. That will at least give you a more accurate spectator point of view. If that doesn't work, I'd go back and watch your source material again, looking for little thing that could be sticking points for you. If your source material happens to be Youtube, by a bloody pass video and learn the real thing. Not accusing you, but somebody once asked me for help with the pass because he'd learned it inadequately from a Youtube tutorial. Needless to say, I wasn't too thrilled with the idea of helping this individual.
Excellent point about not using a mirror! I was, for a while extremely unconfident with my pass because I could see every motion in the mirror. If you have the capability, (And I realize that this isn't always feasible) I have foind that connecting a video camera to your computer and positioning it to where a spectator's eyes would be allows a much better perspective on how your pass looks.
To ZeroPhun31:
Just to clarify (and I'm not saying this is in any way what you meant), please don't think that I'm considering practice unimportant. Practice of the mechanics is absolutely essential in order to pull off the killer effects that we do for people. I would encourage anyone that the first thing to do to improve is practice, practice, and practice the mechanics.
However, in my thinking, the mechanics are not what the spectator is going to remember. In fact, if they do remember the mechanics, then you did something horribly wrong because that is what they're not supposed to see!
A spectator remembers how a magician performs a trick. They remember how they were drawn into the performance, and then blown away by the impossible. That is why I feel that the performance is so important. The presentation will not only make you memorable to the spectator, but will often serve to cover up sleights or even mistakes!
True, you won't be able to misdirect every spectator. We've all had spectators who refuse to look anywhere but your hands, and that is where the mechanics come back into play.
With that, I would personally disagree with your practice ratio, because it isn't something set in stone. A beginner will put much more than 60% into the mechanics and much less than 40% into the presentation, while a master magician will maybe have it completely the opposite, though the importance of practice is never diminished.
I enjoyed your post, and would love to trade more thoughts back and forth on this or any other topic!
~The Asian