There's a lot of armchair speculating going on about this.
What I love about this guy's mission (and why I'm rooting for him) is because he is simply and intensely applying a theory. Succeed or fail, he won't prove (or disprove) the theory, but it will be a fascinating data point for us all.
To me there's a sort of a Bayesian logic working against any hypothetical "adult novice puts in 10,000 hours of work and becomes a pro" story, which is that anyone who has the willpower and passion to put in that much work probably has already. If you are so excited about a sport/instrument/game/hobby that you're willing to put 10,000 hours into it starting from scratch, why weren't you working on it before?
I recently mentioned reading an amazing music theory book and someone asked me if it had lots of prerequisites or if he could understand it. My response was "It doesn't really require previous theory knowledge, but if you weren't excited enough about music theory to have acquired that other knowledge already, I doubt this book is going to be that interesting to you."
Ah, but for Dan it's not just a golf thing, it's a dedicated practice thing as well. Whereas before he had tried things as experiments and (at least in the field of commercial photography) become competent, this time the measures of success include not just acquired skill but also the duration of focused practice.
As his family and advisors reported in the article, this isn't just different from what he's done before, it's different from what most (all?) people have done before.
This seems logical. It doesn't seem shocking to propose that considering the way he went about this 10000-hour experiment decision, he'll soon find something new to worry about and quit before he finishes.
Sounds reasonable, but what about the fact that there are a great many more pursuits in life that one might enjoy, but simply hasn't had enough time to investigate, or simply has not yet been exposed to sufficiently to recognise the enjoyment that comes from pursuing it?
Well, there is a pretty large difference between enjoying something and dedicating a giant chunk of your life to it. But in any case, I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying why it's unlikely.
Sometimes you discover things you love "late" in your life.
I always have loved dancing, but only did that in discos and partying, taking no classes. Then I started going to some classes (bollywood dancing) in 2008. That wasn't it yet.
September 2009 I started doing lindy hop, I love it. If I could devote even more time to it I would, but it's hard to do with a full-time job that pays for the dancing and some family debt. I was 34 then, and some time later I started keeping an approximate account of how much have I done, classes and social dancing, to have an idea of how much it would take to get to the 10k hours to be really good(yeah, I heard of it too).
Now I have about around 694 hours of lindy-related dances (287 classes, 309 social, 91 solo charleston and some tap, blues to the side) and I'm starting to be good enough to recognise most of my failings without help.
It's not as impressive as what he does, but it's about 11 hours of dancing a week this year, while keeping a full-time job, being a bit sleep-deprived because of night parties, and trying to live as frugal as I can in order to have money for classes, international workshops and parties almost every day of the week.
Yeah, this means that if this (10k hours) is true I'd need a bit more than 20 years to get to be exceptional. Well, at least I will get good at this thing I love.
I'm just saying that in life there are so many hours in each day and we tend to gravitate towards not just what we enjoy, but what we are more competent at (and thus more confident and comfortable with), which means whatever interest gains early traction is likely to take over at the expense of the other interests we may have otherwise focussed on.
I agree slightly with your point, but I most adults have hundreds hours of time spent doing new activities that they didn't get to do as a child. So if someone "discovers" painting in their 20s or 30s maybe it is feasible to be a great painter 10 years later.
Great point and spot-on, I think. Also, you mentioning that music theory book reminds me of what SICP is for programming.
I haven't read "Outliers" yet, but from what I've gathered about it I think the biggest thing Gladwell fails to mention is the single-minded drive and zealous mission that's inherent in true outliers. Read the biography of any extraordinary performer (Buffett, Steve Jobs, Rockefeller, Ted Williams, Michael Jackson...) and you get the sense that they were willing to die for it. They didn't do it to test theories or even test their potential. Their craft defined their entire existence. It was their all and everything, it was their life.
I have been playing golf since I was 6 years old (I am now 25, running a YC company and whiteyboard). I've played competitively, going all over the country and even got a full scholarship to a NCAA Division 1 university for the sport.
I can honestly say that this guy does not stand a chance, and here is why.
1. Golf, especially when it comes to playing professionally, is more of a mental sport than physical (both strength and muscle memory). Even if this guy can learn to hit the ball 300 yards, it will take him at least 10 years if not longer to get the mental comfort required to play effectively in front of thousands of people and successfully place or win an event.
2. The 10,000 hour rule is best applied to things like coding or langauge learning, in other words, low pressure learning environments that have structured guidelines to success. Golf, beyond mental and physical, requires great feel. To be able to know that in 15 mile an hour wind, with your ball half buried by sand, and water in front of the green, how would one hit that shot? There are millions of variations of what you could end up with on the golf course, none that could be figured out in 10,000 hours. We haven't even talked about the putting green yet. Yikes
3. I've seen this before, over a dozen times. Guy gets tired of his job, has some talent and decides to take a ton of golf lessons and practice hard to go for the tour. At least the guys Im referring to played college golf. This guy didn't so much as do that.
4. Golf is seriously hard and the difference between the best players and the mediocre pro players most of the time is just an average difference of a few shots. To shave off those few shots is next to impossible once you've reached your peak potential.
Golf is not for everyone. This guy is wasting his time.
Update ( I forgot something):
Here is another reason why this is a pointless ambition.
5. 10,000 hours of golf is a lot different than 10,000 of something like...learning a language (we'll use this again). To become good at golf does not mean that you can sit on the driving range and hit golf balls every day until your hands bleed. To become a great player, one must get great at playing the golf course. To play one round of golf takes between 3-5 hours (depending on where you play), and there is no guarantee that those 5 hours spent on the course are in any way productive to your progress. That is not a good use of time spent in his quest for 10,000 hours. Someone could certainly guarantee that in 5 focused hours of a spanish tutoring session that they have progresses. With golf, a bad round could send you right back to the drawing board.
Golf is mostly mental. That certainly isn't a problem: you can train mentality. In fact what you've just argued is that golf is well-suited to be conquered purely through training (among sports). Dan would have a much harder time becoming effective in basketball, where normal-size people are at a huge disadvantage off the bat.
Golf requires feel. Where do you think feel comes from? (Training!) Again, you've actually argued that golf is well-suited to Dan's approach, not the opposite.
You've seen this before. No you haven't. Come on.
Golf is hard. That's tautological. Anything that can reasonably be called an endeavor is in some sense infinitely hard. (Also: how do you know that shaving off those last few strokes is impossible once you've achieved your potential? Did you dedicate your life to golf?)
Sometimes you'll have a day of training that won't contribute to your progress. Anybody trying to learn anything will experience days like that.
This is a cool and ballsy experiment and you're being a bit of a hater. Do I think Dan will become a PGA golfer? No, but I'm looking forward to seeing him try.
An interesting response. This statement however is demonstrably incorrect:
"This guy is wasting his time."
Whether or not you believe his hypothesis, you cannot deny that he is not rigorously testing it. And one of two things will be true at the end of his experiment; He'll be playing in the PGA, or he won't. In both cases he has learned a number of valuable things, and he will have advanced the understanding of expertise in some small way, and perhaps he will have opened up some new avenues for exploration.
Personally I don't know if I could put 10K hours into something that I wasn't really enjoying, coding? sure, golfing? not so much. (even though I was employee #9 at GolfWeb :-)) So on that level I think his experiment is doubly valuable.
And one of two things will be true at the end of his experiment; He'll be playing in the PGA, or he won't. In both cases he has learned a number of valuable things
Though one could argue that "learning an important lesson" isn't enough payoff for six whole years of your life. "Well," he can say, "I spent six years of my life, and fuck-knows-how-many hundred thousand dollars in lost earning potential, and I still didn't get good enough to be anything other than a children's golf instructor at a suburban course in Ohio, but... hey, I learned that I'm actually not all that good at golf."
Its an interesting argument hugh3, that the learning is insufficient payoff for 6 years of your life, but the cynic in my says the same could be said of going to college and coming out with a masters degree is Celtic Literature of the medieval period. (6 years, little employment in the field, not a Phd so you probably can't get a teaching job, etc etc).
Lets say he does make it into the PGA, and plays for four years and doesn't win a single tournament but finishes in the money in all of them. (note that generally the top 70 or so players all get some money [1]) Depending on his walk through that distribution he has a good shot at making a million dollars over four years ($250K/yr). Which would be the equivalent of having made 100K/yr for 10yrs.
The payment schedule is another area where the PGA differs greatly from other sports which appear to have a much shallower 'money' pool. (I'm familiar with Golf, less so with say Nascar racing or Tennis for example).
The other assumption in your response is this one "but... hey, I learned that I'm actually not all that good at golf." which is at the heart of the whole Expertise/Outliers debate.
The hypothesis is that there is a 'base level' of expertise which anyone can achieve with 10,000 hrs of focused practice. And once you have invested that time the difference between your performance and that of someone who was 'gifted from birth' will normalize out, or more precisely winning or losing becomes more statistical rather than expertise related.
No doubt he's getting some sponsorship money from Nike and others who are betting that he will generate enough publicity like this to put their brand in front of others who are attracted by his story, so earning potential isn't exactly 'wasted' so much as 'different.' It wasn't clear from the original article to me what sort of pay scale he might expect 'working for the man' as it were. So its hard to evaluate the opportunity cost of that path.
So if the hypothesis is correct, and he's rigorous in his training/practice, then he will make back much more than his 'earning potential' over those 6 years. Much like an investor listening to a start-up pitch which will take 6 years to disrupt the market. Give the guy credit for going 'all in'.
Well, chances are you'll have a better tan & more vitamin D. Yet I can't imagine that you can get a masters in Celtic Literature of any period without studying something other than Celtic Literature. You will have a bachelors degree as well, with more to it than quite a few of the degrees out there.
How is this different from sinking 6 years of your life into a startup? Are the skills you acquire from running a startup more transferable to other businesses, and therefore makes it okay even if you fail and learn that you're not that good at running your own gig?
1. It helps to get started out right with no bad habits to unlearn. For example, I started playing disc golf and I got on a forum and everyone said "Start with a putter and nothing else." Two years later I have what might be called a fairway driver(innova Gazelle) as my fastest disc in the bag. I can play against guys that are throwing discs 2x or even 3x faster than I am and I compete against them pretty well. My shots aren't as far, but they are better shaped and more accurate. I can also putt much better than them. If you start out how he did learning how to putt first and working backwards you will have a very solid game. Did you do this?
2 You need dedicated practice, not just any practice. The time you dick around with friends, try trick shots, go out and drink some beer don't count. Most people spend a large part of their 'practice' doing this. I was putting 1,000+ times a night to improve my putting game and that was deliberate, dedicated practice.
3.I would agree with you if you would have said, "This guy has no history of sticking with anything." The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. It's going to take a lot to change his behavior and stick with it. But the fact that he hasn't touched a golf club isn't going to hold him back.
I believe this guy is adding significantly to the sport of golf, human behavior research, and just doing awesome experiments. Congrats to him, and I wish him the best!
But do you not think it possible that your perspective (as a golfer from a young age) is skewing the reality of your statement? I specifically state this because you talk in such absolutes.
One's brain will typically dismiss a "n00b" trying to become good at something that one is good at without the experience that one has. I believe this is possible because if they do succeed it will invalidate ones own experience which can be a reality our brain wishes to shelter us from.
To make this more relevant to our industry I occasionally bump into the same problem when applying for coding jobs due to my lack of degree and the possession of a degree by the person advertising for the position.
Exactly - look at TV shows like MTV's 'Made' and similar, where people 'focus' (in the case of 'Made', not even very hard) and get to a respectable level, just by having a coach and putting in some time. There are other TV shows where people actually take 10 weeks or so to do something full time - things that the 'pros' say of that it's so hard to learn (like dancing, or hairdressing, or whatever). They usually compete with serious amateurs or pros at the end, and often cannot be picked out as the 'amateurs'.
People want to believe that what they do is so hard that it requires many years of practice, but in reality it's often just not true.
"That was the weird thing about Barkley. You did fix him. On the range and on the simulator, he had 300-yard drives. He couldn't take it to the course. He had the mental full-swing yips, and you had him killing it.
Yeah, the change was that before he couldn't do it on the range. Now he can do it on the range, but still can't do it on the course. So he's playing left-handed now. He's actually pretty good.
It's bizarre that a professional athlete wouldn't be physically able to do it.
He is physically able to, he isn't mentally able to. It's bizarre when somebody shoots less than 50 percent from the foul line, it's bizarre when Chuck Knobloch can't throw it to first base, it's bizarre when Rick Ankiel throws 18 pitches in a row to the backstop. But it happens."
I had to look up Rick Ankiel. Interesting story of what sounds like a complete mental breakdown of a skill. Tiger Woods seems to be going through a minor form of this now.
I'm not sure it will work. I expect golf rewards basic aptitudes like co-ordination, strength and stamina, etc., and that pros' endowments on these are four or five standard deviations from the population norm. They were likely selected for those endowments prior to most of their practice. Where is Dan on that curve? But I suppose how much these endowments matter, or whether work can enhance them, is a rough part of this experiment.
I am sure that I like his approach a damn sight better than yours. The guy is _working_. He'll have to beat all sorts of inner demons to get to 10,000 hours. He'll end up knowing a lot about learning, and himself, when he's done. That's my kind of guy.
Meanhwile, you are lobbing poorly thought-out downerisms. "get great at playing the course"? Gee, do you think maybe he'll budget some of his 10k for that? or that the ability to hit his shot straight _every_single_time_ might help? or that all those hours will do something for his mental chops? Coding "has structured guidelines for success"? None of this is intelligent, never mind constructive.
You're only 25, you were clearly a good athlete, you made YC, congratulations. No doubt worked your ass off up to this point. Well, some people have to grind it out even harder than you've had to. If you can't spare the time to think through helpful commentary, respect their dedication and keep your mouth shut.
I'm not sure it will work. I expect golf rewards basic aptitudes like co-ordination, strength and stamina, etc., and that pros' endowments on these are four or five standard deviations from the population norm.
In golf (unlike most pro sports) it isn't immediately obvious that this is the case. Sure, most golfers are in shape, but few aerobically fitter than a recreational 10K runner, and the variation in max drive length between successful pros shows that strength is pretty variable too.
As an extreme example there are players like John Daly, who is overweight, smokes and is a double major winner.
We might, on close examination, find that pro golfers have extraordinary endowments on attributes subtler than sheer speed or strength. Stuff like depth perception, coordination of full-body motions, balance, maybe some cognitive attributes like executive control of focus, etc.
As others have noted, the effort is in part a test of people's ability to enhance these endowments. I _think_ most people putting in 10,000 hours got feedback that their basic endowments give them some advantage.
I suspect that something like that will operate here. If at some point Dan hits diminishing returns, and can't punch through by varying his approach and allowing for natural human slumps, that may be a signal that he lacks the physical tools to go all the way. Even then that isn't a waste of time, he'll have learned a lot about focus, and about detecting where his natural advantages do lie. That has to inform the search for his real calling.
"pros' endowments on these are four or five standard deviations from the population norm. They were likely selected for those endowments prior to most of their practice."
In the Outliers book, Gladwell also talks about the topic of how kids are selected for in sports. He uses the example of hockey. Essentially, the kids start out young and there isn't much difference in their ability in the beginning. But the 'chosen' kids get more attention, instruction and practice. So over the years they become "four or five standard deviations from the population norm", to use your phrase, but they don't start out that way.
In the hockey example, it comes down to size. A typical 6 and half year old is bigger, and that much more developed that a 6 year old, and they are slightly better players because of it. Essentially, this small advantage gets exaggerated.
So, according to Gladwell, people all start out in a very similar place, and it's the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice and work that makes the difference.
I don't know if this guy will make the PGA (there aren’t too many spots), but I am confident he'll be several standard deviations better than the population norm.
The book Soccernomics touches on a similar point: how socioeconomic factors influence the pool of candidates for spending inordinate amounts of time training. In the case of the English national football club, the fact that the pool of national team players was historically concentrated among players coming from working class backgrounds shrunk the sampling of genetic talent (since kids from upperclass backgrounds had more opportunities both athletically, academically and economically) which led them out of the pool.
In the US, the position of golf within society constrains the genetic pool from which top players will emerge, which may in turn lead to tour pros being much more likely to come from classes and situations with easier or cheaper access to golf courses than due to innate ability. The range may still skew towards those with physical gifts doing better, but not as much as you would think. Given these constraints he may have a much better shot at achieving success in golf than in other sports that draw from larger genetic pools. (E.g., compare the number of kids playing competitive high school and college football to the number playing competitive golf.)
That said, there are around 22,000 people in the US who could be considered "club pros" or instructors of golf, and around 150 slots on the PGA tour. His 1 in 100 shot would just about correspond to these numbers if you figure that most of those club pros have put in close to 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (allowing them to get paid to hang around the golf course) and it is certainly reasonable to believe that he will achieve that level with his current plan.
"[Pros] were likely selected for those endowments prior to most of their practice."
That is exactly the point of the 10,000 hour practice - to provide a documented counterexample to that point of view, in accordance with recent theory on expertise training.
"Golf, beyond mental and physical, requires great feel. To be able to know that in 15 mile an hour wind, with your ball half buried by sand, and water in front of the green, how would one hit that shot? There are millions of variations of what you could end up with on the golf course, none that could be figured out in 10,000 hours."
10,000 hours is a long time, what makes you think it is not enough time to acquire a great feel for golf? How long did it take you to acquire your great feel?
This brings to mind Arthur C. Clarke's first law[1].
There's a difference between making the case that someone can do something because you have experience in doing it and making the case that someone can't because you haven't. There are presumably quite a few people who've tried an approach similar to yours, but there aren't that many who have tried Dan's approach... yet.
So what you are saying (whether you meant to or not) is not that it is impossible to become a pro in 10,000 hours... but rather that your training has be to be focused on what "being a pro" really means.
If he were to integrate your exact points into his training, it certainly sounds like enough time to resolve your issues.
Not all hours are equal, it's pretty close to impossible to be as productive while you're tired as when you're well rested. Not to mention that the person you're quoting is not a professional golfer. Tiger is probably closer to 100,000 hours than he is to 10,000...
He never said he wants to take on Tiger Woods. The experiment seeks to validate and analyze whether or not 10k hours of practice will get one to expertise. I find it dismissive for all expert golfers (whether pro or not) below Woods (who lies at the extreme top end of the expertise pool).
Here's some perspective: for Woods to have golfed 100,000 hours, he should have done so:
- 8 hours a day every single day since he was born.
or
- 11 hours a day every single day since he was 10.
Let me start off by saying I clearly added an extra 0 pre-edit. Tiger hasn't been alive for a million hours.
Second, I said closer to 100,000 than 10,000. So I'm taking the over on 55k hours. Although I do think 100k is possible, even if unlikely(say 4-5 hours a day from 2-21, then 18 a day from 21-present). I do think he's probably averaged more than 8 hours a day since he turned pro if you include all activities that are meant to improve his ability on the golf course. That's clearly pretty close to the upper bound but more likely than 10k.
Finally I agree that it's dismissive towards incredible golfers and I think that's why it's so many people looked at the article and commented here. I have no doubt that if someone puts in 10k hours over 6 years they would likely be a damn good golfer(better than scratch) but touring pro level is very unlikely. The issue in my mind that this article is stupid because either 1) It's obvious that you could get very good but perhaps not incredible at something after 10k hours of practice or 2) because we go by the title and realize that becoming a touring pro after not touching a golf club in the first 30 years of your life is not at all likely.
It seems likely you're biased due to your experiences being isolated at a young age. Yes, this person has no chance of ever succeeding at any of your golfing accomplishments because he can't get any younger to even try them! Yet in a turn of events, he is probably more likely than you to ever make it to the pro tour (however unlikely).
If you actually read the article, he doesn't so much care about making it pro. "He grants that there's a "99 percent chance I'm not going to become a PGA golfer ... Basically, what I'm trying to do with this project is demonstrate how far you're able to go if you're willing to put in the time."
Isn't the 10,000 hour most commonly applied to things like playing the violin? I haven't seen many cases of it being applied to coding, nor language learning, in the academic papers I've read anyway...
I can recommend reading "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance", it paints a clear pictures of what Expertise actually is.
To answer the question you pose above about other domains, I have not seen language learning reported in the expert performance literature, but I was a language learner (native speaker of English who was studying Chinese) who perhaps arguably did reach expert level in my acquired language (I passed testing to be a contract Chinese-English interpreter for the United States federal government). It took perhaps 10,000 learning contact hours (many of those hours during a three-year stay overseas after completing my undergraduate degree in Chinese) to reach that level of language proficiency, which was confirmed by other tests. I also had excellent instruction in Chinese with some of the best materials then avaiable, and a lot of supportive help from linguistics that I studied at the time. Some of my advice on language learning
would probably help other learners get the most benefit per hour in their language learning situations that they can.
What I find most interesting about K. Anders Ericsson's research on expert performance is the suggestion that some domains have few or no experts, when experts are defined as persons with statistically reliably superior performance in the domain. The example I recall from one of his research papers is choosing common stocks in which to invest for sustained high returns. Some people beat the market for a while, but most stick-pickers do very little better than simply investing in a diverse basket of stocks chosen without conscious thought.
To me, it's hard to know what counts as an hour of golfing anyway. Playing golf is, for the most part, a time-inefficient way of practicing golf. You take a couple of hours to go round the course, and if you're good you're only making ninety shots in that time. Go to the driving range or putting green, though, and you can practice ninety shots in five minutes.
I had a similar thought with regards to high stakes gambling (pool, poker, golf, backgammon and prop trading). When you learn to do any of these one has to learn how to deal with making decisions under time and money pressure. Everybody that has ever played a sport competitively has made mistakes under duress that are difficult to explain later because your mind shuts off during that period. This is probably a limbic response to stress - your first instinct under danger is to switch to flight/fight and may not be using the framework that 10k hours (or however much time spent) built. Everyone can get better at moderating their response to this but I suspect that some people are naturally better suited at shrugging off the blaze of autonomic responses and still be able to focus on the task at hand properly. The people who attempt to put in 10k and fail because they can't handle pressure aren't accounted for. It makes for a nice book but saying 10k hours is all it took Michael Jordan or Gretzky or Mozart to hit their "master level" ignores this survivorship bias.
I think Jason has a good point that hitting a golf ball and being able to function under pressure are two very very different abilities and professional golf is most likely selecting for both abilities.
If somebody is willing to put 10,000 hours in anything it requires dedication and the mental strength. If someone was extremely dedicated you can put in 40 hours a week it would still take 5 years to accomplish this. This guy has a decent chance to make if he does do this. My thoughts he probably won't finish.
I think you could be right about golf being a bad choice for 10000 hours, but I don't think you're looking at the challenge the right way.
Re: 1) I think the idea is that 10000 hours of practice include all aspects of the game. There is no reason why his plan can't include playing his way up through all grades of tournaments and working on his mental game.
2) That sounds exactly like the kind of experience turned into intuition that the human brain is good at. I don't think there is any reason to think that aspect is inbuilt (though of course it might be).
3) But 10000 hours? Thats 6 days a week for 6 years.
4) I think this guy would be very happy being a mediocre pro.
5) Yeah I'm not sure I get that point at all. You don't have to get a good score to practice attentively.
>To become good at golf does not mean that you can sit on the driving range and hit golf balls every day until your hands bleed.
I disagree with this part. Fighters learn to fight by sparring with each other in very controlled settings. The first time they have a situation where the other person is trying to hurt them in earnest is in the ring. "Ring rust" (the equivalent to actual course play, playing in front of people, etc.) does play a role but it's a vastly smaller role than the actual techniques which can be learned in isolation.
There was a famous pro golfer who said he used to hit golf balls on the course until he got to the green and then take the ball and move on. There was no reason for him to practice the greens because he could do that elsewhere. Isolated training seemed to work for him.
tl;dr I think you're putting way too much value on playing in front of people and putting all the techniques together. Learning the techniques themselves is the hard part in any sport.
When I read this I'm thinking of Unskilled and Unaware of It[1]. You know how hard golf is because you have som experience with golf. But probably lots of things that you don't think would be as hard as golf actually is just as hard.
All of this may be true, 6 years is a long time and if he takes your guidance he should plan to spend time with a sports psychologist early on and get spectated match practice as early as feasible (say after 4 years).
It's doable, very, very unlikely I grant you, but it's doable.
Jason,
Your insightful comments fully illustrate the 10,000 hour expertise challenge. I speculate that each of the issues you mention can be addressed by comprehensive coaching and incremental practice.
Dan had no bad golf habits to break and has been coached from the very first stroke. Suppose Dan can be coached not to lose his temper? Suppose Dan can be coached to recover mentally from a poor shot? Furthermore, with an exercise coach hopefully Dan can avoid the injuries that plague golf pros.
Update in response to your update: Coaching is what makes hours of practice productive. Bad days reinforce bad habits. Dan is already playing a variety of geographically dispersed golf courses and is accustomed to bad weather. According to his blog posts, his recent bad days result in better scores than his good days just a few weeks earlier.
Jason, think back over your golf career - wonder how much better you could have been with no bad habits to unlearn, and constant comprehensive coaching.
I suspect Jason has allowed pride to inflate himself somewhat. He probably has come to feel that things like the 'mental game' of golf is an innate ability he posses and others do not, rather than something he has come to earn.
This is not an insult, especially as he had to earn it to even have it; it is a folly I find myself making often as well. Once you have beat something into yourself so thoroughly it feels like second nature, even you begin to suspect maybe it really was second nature after all.
His improvement seems to be fairly rapid. I guess if this is your sole pursuit, not that surprising. But nevertheless makes I'm rooting for him. I think it would be testament to the theory.
Overtraining is different from people's tendency to plateau.
Overtraining is what happens when an athlete's training frequency is greater than their body's ability to recover. That is, by the time the next training sessions comes around, they haven't yet recovered from the last one. This can harm overall performance for obvious reasons.
That may lead to a plateau, but I think plateau's happen more often when the athlete ceases to learn from training sessions. And that happens when they're just doing the same thing, over and over.
All practiced activities show diminishing returns. If you practice 5 days a week (assuming your body can handle it), the benefit of practicing 6 days a week (assuming your body can handle it) is not going to be the same as going from 1 to 2 days. But if your body can handle it, you probably will still improve.
Are you being funny or are you implying results can be linear?
Have you ever seen personal bests charts? Save specific cases of breaktrhoughs, it plots very logarithmic for everybody. That is diminishing returns, more or less.
Being a golf pro requires a lot from the mental side as well. First you need the skills, which you can only acquire through countless ours of practice. But there are so many people with those skills that it's really about who performs best under pressure.
So if he fails, it says nothing about the theory. Should he succeed, that's a whole another story and would be pretty exciting.
I've seen animators go from rank beginner to pretty awesome in the hands of John Krickfalusi. And trust me, there are a lot of mental skills involved in animating. As well as a lot of pressure.
How long did this take? About five years.
He bitches now and then that he's the unpaid master class of the Hollywood TV industry. Not everyone (me, for instance) who's done time at Spümcø is working in the animation industry. But everyone who spent much time doing John's directed practice can draw rings around most people with their eyes closed.
The hard part, IMHO, was putting in the time to practice and keep practicing. Even on a shitty day. This guy seems to have that down; he's been able to structure his life so that he doesn't have much to distract him from golf. If he keeps at it and doesn't get run over by a truck, I'm pretty sure he will either become a pro or burn out.
It's always inspiring to see such examples of people going from novice to pro, and I'm sure the role of a great teacher can't be underestimated. But I'd say the biggest difference between sports and say graphics design or coding, is that in sports you're measured only by how you perform in competitive situations with everyone's eyes on you (and your mind easily wandering to what tomorrow's headlines are going to say). This is especially true in golf where a small glitch in your nervous system can cause you to miss badly.
But the great animators or coders are those who can produce great value under normal working conditions, which are much more similar to practice conditions than the competitive environment in sports.
I can think of one area in business, which is more like the competitive environment in sports: negotiating. The pressure caused by these situations shows easily in your non-verbal communication, and if you appear lacking confidence, it can undermine all your further efforts. The pressure makes some people to crack, but few people can gain extra motivation from it and are able to use it to their advantage. The sports experts often say this is what separates the very best athletes from the rest.
This reminds me of a blog I read a few years ago called "Scratch to Scratch". The point of the exercise was to go from being an ultrabeginner golfer to a par golfer in a year of serious practice and training.
You can also count on this "Dan Plan" becoming a book. Ultimately, that's the entire point of this project anyways. Not to be a golf champion, but to sell a lot of books.
I would believe it were he 20. However, most golfers start fading in their thirties, having lost the extra power that their bodies could provide when younger. While I don't doubt that he will be an excellent golfer (thus "proving" that 10,000 hours of dedicated practice will indeed make you great) I certainly doubt he will be a PGA golfer.
That said, he might have a chance for a lesser tour. And that, for sure, will lead him to his true goal: motivational speaking! (Oh... come on, like it isn't obvious...)
I've certainly thought about doing similar, outrageous things. It seems to be a current pattern: do something seemingly outrageous and interesting, write about it, derive income.
I believe your comment is spot on. The debates here is basically about what "professional level" careful training and hard work can bring this guy up to. The "nay-sayers" (including myself) agree on that he might become much more proficient than amateur golf players, maybe even "have a chance for a lesser tour" (as you put it), but he won't be able to make it into the top level games such as PGA tour tournaments. This is the case for almost all competitive sports.
I'm not fond of all these attention grabbing hotshots. Gladwell's theory is completely bogus.
A guy in UK tried to do that for Marathon and aimed to become an olympian. He did a lot of media and called his upcoming documentary "The Road to Beijing". He didn't make it, and wasn't even close (from what I remember it was 2:40 or 2:45). Then he went to Ethiopia and picked a protege. His protege was fast but didn't win a thing.
He is now a motivational speaker. I guess blatant self promotion always works. He used to be the running joke in UK runner's forums but he is the one laughing now.
The world record is 2:03. The guy you mentioned may not have been close to the world record, but a 2:40 marathon is 26 back-to-back 6 minute, 10 second miles. That's pretty damned good.
Looking at the 2010 results from the NY and Boston Marathons, that's a few minutes shy of the 100th best person. Considering that those are elite races with entrants from around the world, I think his time is pretty damned good in an absolute sense, not just a relative sense. Best in the world, no. Olympic level, no. But I'd consider him elite.
Certainly he's very good, but there's still a huge gulf between him and the best marathon runners.
And that's why this ten thousand hours thing is pretty random, yet pretty unfalsifiable. In any specialised activity, the first hundred hours of dedicated practice is good enough to make you better than most people. Keep practicing and you'll be better than 80% of the world. Keep it up for a bunch more time and you'll be better than 90% of the world. By the time the irrelevant ten thousand hours milestone pops by, you'll certainly be impressive at your activity, but whether you're in the top 5% or the top 0.001% depends on which activity you've chosen (plus your natural talent in that field).
So for some definition of "expert", it's fair to say that ten thousand hours will make you an expert.
but whether you're in the top 5% or the top 0.001% depends on which activity you've chosen (plus your natural talent in that field).
I would be fine with that result. My objection is when people say "I'm just not good at X," when what they really mean is "I'm not as good at X as I think I should be, that frustrates me, and I lack the motivation to continue trying." If we can demonstrate that with enough practice, anyone can get good at anything (with a large delta of good), then I think that's meaningful.
If that statement is self-evident to you, I've talked to people who don't consider it so. For example, I've talked to other CS majors who think that most people just don't have the right "mind" for programming, and I've taught programming to people who said similar things.
If we can demonstrate that with enough practice, anyone can get good at anything (with a large delta of good), then I think that's meaningful.
I'd agree with that, which is a very different claim than "there's no such thing as innate talent".
I've talked to other CS majors who think that most people just don't have the right "mind" for programming
I'd also agree with that, and I don't think it's contradictory. Have you really not observed that some people pick up programming far easier than others? I believe that almost anyone can get to the point where they can write basic software, but not that everyone is capable of becoming the next Dennis Ritchie.
I think that initial aptitude at a task is not a good predictor for how well you can do after doing it for a decade. It is a good predictor for likelihood at actually pursuing it for a decade, because it often determines whether or not you like the activity.
Put another way, people become good at things that they like because they keep doing them. We get positive reinforcement. But I don't think there are a class of people who have the "mind" for programming.
Also note that by bring up Dennis Ritchie, you've now introduced the "what does it take to be a genius" discussion, which is different from achieving expert status.
Well, you probably wouldn't ever get in the top 5% of marathon runners if you didn't have legs [1]. I'd argue that it's similar for something like programming. I think you'll find that some people lack the mental acuity or analytical reasoning skills to be in the top 5% of programmers. Those skills can be taught to a certain extent, I suppose, but I don't doubt you'll find people that would plateau well before breaking into "expert" territory. You'd likely find the same for someone trying to reach that point in golf or any other number of skills.
Do most people lack those necessary skills? I'm not really sure.
[1]: For the purpose of the argument, ignore prosthetics. AFAIK, there isn't anything similar to prosthetics for someone that lacks certain necessary abilities to be an "expert" programmer.
So for some definition of "expert", it's fair to say that ten thousand hours will make you an expert.
I've just been using Google to find a crisp definition of "expert" that I can cite to one of Ericsson's papers. Some of those are in nonsearchable .PDF documents. The short answer is that the formal scientific literature on acquisition of expertise does not bless anyone who desires the title "expert" with that title, but rather uses objective performance measures to identify persons with statistically reliably superior performance. I'll post this now, and look for more definitions and references, and try to edit this post during the edit time limit if I find something more on-point for you to look up. Ericsson's seminal paper on the issue
we can find this extensive discussion of the definition of expertise:
"Since [Bedard's and Chi's (1992)] review, researchers have become increasingly dissatisfied with studies that define experts by social criteria (e.g., peer nominations), by extended domain experience, or by (high) education. When scientists measured the level of real-world performance of so-called experts they found that many were not reliably better than their less-experienced colleagues. For example, reviews (Ericsson, 2006) have described studies showing that a psychotherapist’s level of education and clinical experience is unrelated to their treatment outcomes. Recent reviews of performance in health-related fields show that extended experience of doctors and nurses (beyond the first couple of years of practice) is not associated with continued improvements, as most people had thought. In fact, performance has frequently been found to decrease without continued training (Choudhry, Fletcher, & Soumerai, 2005; Ericsson 2004).
"There are numerous domains of expertise in which some performers are reproducibly superior to most others engaging in the domain.For example, chess masters, bridge experts, and experts in other games consistently beat less-skilled individuals. More generally, in the arts and the sciences some individuals reliably generate superior products that are selected for presentation in journals, conferences, and competitions. Some individuals are able to perform at a reproducibly higher level in professional domains too. Our framework focuses on understanding the mechanisms that mediate consistently superior performance, and to distinguish this approach from the traditional study of expertise we will refer to it as the expert-performance approach (see Feltovich, Prietula, & Ericsson, 2006, for a description of the historical development of several approaches to the study of expertise using psychological methods)."
You must have accidentally looked at rankings for subgroups of runners.
In the 2010 Boston Marathon, the runners between 2:40 and 2:41 placed from 208th to 227th. This group included a man in his 50's. 2:40 is a nice PR for a hobbyist, but it was a bit much for that guy to start talking Olympics and make a documentary of himself.
I think that calling Gladwell's suggestion that 10,000 hours is the magic number to become an expert bogus based on your single data point is a bit hasty. Gladwell didn't say that everybody who puts in 10,000 hours of band lessons becomes the Beatles. The way I interpreted the book was that the 10,000 hours of practice was simply a prerequisite to becoming the Beatles. There were numerous other factors outside of this practice time requirement that lifted the Beatles to fame. Many of those factors were luck-driven, including but not limited to inherent talent that they were born with.
In fact, my interpretation of Outliers was that being good is simply a prerequisite - the rest is heavily luck-driven even though nobody really likes to talk about it.
The theory isn't about becoming the best in the world. It's about achieving "greatness" or "success." Most people can't even run a marathon, much less do so in under 3 hours. I don't see how you could call someone unsuccessful who can do so.
>"Most people can't even run a marathon, much less do so in under 3 hours."
// Most people don't try.
I think that most healthy people could walk (you said "run") a marathon if they desired to. even if you walked for 2 miles an hour and had a 10 minute break that would be 17 hours of effort. 3mph is the usually quoted walking speed.
This kind of crazy promise sidelines real athletes working hard for many years. Many athletes working hard were in his shadow in the media. Media spots are very important for non-professional athletes as they depend on sponsorships and donations.
How is someone practicing 6 hours a day, 6 days a week for 6 years with the intention of going pro not a "real athlete working hard for many years?"
That's what I don't understand about all the negative replies in this thread. What defines a "real athlete" if it's not a whole lot of hard work? How does quantifying the effort make it less real?
This article is about someone committing to practicing "six hours a day, six days a week, for six years". Are you sure your "guy in UK" story is analogous? He actually committed 10,000 hours to the mission not once but twice?
The Beijing 2008 marathon was run in extreme heat and humidity. The times were pushed back severely and some elite runners refused to participate. The last one to finish was 2:41 and the rest were DNF'd.
Actually, I was too generous. He only did 3h10.
From forum comments (not mine):
I have to say after being an early supporter of this project I
totally lost interest. I initially felt inspired by Vero's enthusiasm
and drive and a feeling that "anybody could do it" in an American
dream kind of way. Not sure if it was injury, but why didn't he
run Amsterdam?
I think there is a limit that motivation and hard work can only push that far. Beyond that, it's basically gift or talent rules the game. That may sound bitter when you realize it, but it's a fact of truth. That's especially the case in Math and competitive sports.
I think it is the other way around. Talent can take you only so far. After that you got to put in a lot of hard work. Ask teachers around, and most of them can tell you of many bright kids with big potential who never did anything with it.
Here's one of the original papers that put forth the theory of deliberate practice and the 10,000 hour rule (though in the paper it is given as a 10-year rule):
Six hours a day, six days a week, for six years? Golf can take it's toll on the wrists, forearms, shoulders, lower back, and knees. I predict he'll give up due to overuse injuries long before he reaches 10,000 hours.
If you read Dan's blog, you'll see that he has a physical therapist coaching him. His team of advisors have a good plan and it seems to me that avoiding injury is a big part of that plan. For example, Dan currently is not using any big clubs - the largest a chipping wedge. If his spends most of his practice time near the green how is going to injure his shoulders, lower back or knees?
In a recent blog post Dan mentions that his physical therapist will prescribe a certain weight lifting program to strengthen his muscles enough to achieve the driver head speed that his golf coach plans that he should achieve.
I suppose that today's golf pros, those actually on the tour, have each put in those thousands and thousands of hours of practice, regardless of whatever athletic gifts they received at birth. So are injuries the reason most near-pros never make the tour? That would be the case if your point is true. I think that they don't make the tour because it is simply too much effort and dedication to put in all those hours of practice.
And that's the wonderful thing about Dan's challenge. If valid, it means that any of us may achieve outstanding results if we put in the hours required to gain the expertise. Golf, in this regard, is a model for any skill we need to satisfy our aspirations.
Probably want to start with a few amateur tournaments like club championships, city championships and state championships before moving onto national championships (US Public Links, US Amateur, etc.) If you can't beat the 13 year olds at these tournaments who are breaking par, you probably aren't going to do very well against the adults who use to win those tournaments as kids.
The next argument I hear from a lot of my golfing buddies is that they'll practice hard and play the Senior Tour (Champions Tour). Beating Bubba Watson, for example, in 20 years when he's eligible for the Champions tour is like beating Usain Bolt in a 100 yard dash after giving him a 3 second head start. Won't make good television.
A few books have been written on the subject where reporters try to qualify for the tour.
That being said, it's actually doable, highly unlikely, but doable. I like his chances at becoming a pro golfer (not on the PGA Tour, but maybe the Hooters or Tar Heel Tour) better than his chances of becoming a starting pitcher, running back, point guard, goalie or professional driver in other pro sports. Golf, the game is tremendously "fair".
Agreed, just think of the number of "golf pros" out there that can't even make the tour. Every course has at least one, and these days most driving ranges have them. Unless he discovers that he happens to have some hidden raw talent, his chances are slim-to-none.
There's an unstated assumption that excellence equals pro in this article.
I'd say excellence is a necessary precursor to going pro, but is itself not sufficent. That extra push is some magic combination of genetics, upbringing and opportunity (nature and nurture coming together just so) - all along with the drive and experience to become excellent.
The thing about golf is that practicing six hours doesn't mean you got six hours of practice- you need to play rounds, which take several hours but are only really ~30 minutes of "golf practice" at most...golf is interesting because the athletic prerequisites are minimal compared to most other sports, but this doesn't mean that 10,000 hours is sufficient. I don't doubt that he'll be near-pro level after the 10,000 hours, but I do doubt that he will be good enough that it will be really worth the complete dedication of these six years. He'll be scratch+ for sure, but until you get close to that level, it isn't easy to predict who will have the ability to step up to the true professional level, and who will lose a ton of money traveling on minitours with little chance at ever reaching a PGA/Nationwide tour level (i.e. what most mean when they say "pro").
My perspective on this is based on my experience in playing tennis for 10,000+ hours (not apples-to-apples, obviously, but still relatively close) and becoming good enough to know that there would be absolutely no point in trying to play full-time professionally, because I was too slow to ever reach a level where I could make money while touring.
There's a lot more money in golf, but it also is a lot more expensive (many golf mini-tours pay prize money out of the sizable entry fees they charge...$1k/tourney entry fee is common for small pro golf tourneys) and there's a lot more marginal pro-level players around for the golf tournaments since there aren't nearly as many physical factors in golf as there are in tennis.
is not that 10,000 hours is enough, but rather that deliberate practice is strictly necessary for expertise, and that 10,000 hours (in round figures) is also necessary to achieve what can properly be called expertise in any adult domain of performance. K. Anders Ericsson, the leading researcher in this field, distinguishes "playful engagement" from "deliberate practice" and distinguishes being at the journeyman level of performance from the rarer case of being at the expert level of performance.
What needs more testing is whether 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is not only necessary but also sufficient. Many critiques of Ericsson's findings evoke an ill-defined latent quality labeled "talent" to make the claim that many members of the general public would fail to achieve expertise even if they engaged in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. But such a showing would not be a direct refutation of Ericsson's claim. Rather, it would be necessary to show that someone who is properly called an expert lacked opportunity to engage in lengthy deliberate practice. Mozart didn't write any music composition that musicologists call a "masterpiece" until he had had ten years (and at least 10,000 hours) of intensive study of music guided by his father, who was an author of innovative books on music instruction and a continual guide to young Wolfgang's musical development.
Something I recently realized is that if this theory is true I have a big problem on my hands. See I love flying, and it is one of my life's goals to fly in professional competitions. However flight time in airplanes routinely cost $100 or even $300 an hour. My goal might end up costing me a few million dollars.
At the the skydiving drop zone I used to help run, almost all of our jump pilots were hired with 500-1000 hours. They were all building time to "move up" to bigger aircraft, better paying jobs, etc. Most easily were able to accumulate 500+ hours in a summer. (We flew under Part 91, which does not have a duty time limitation, so they could fly literally from sunup to sundown on a busy day.)
So really all you have to afford out of your own pocket is enough time to get your commercial certificate and be employable for flight instruction, skydiving, crop dusting, banner towing, or any of the other "entry level" pilot jobs out there.
You are absolutely correct there, once somebody has their commercial license it becomes easier and cheaper to build hours. I guess it comes down to how effective the practice is, as acrobatic maneuvers are frowned upon in most commercial settings. :P
Certainly getting your license doesn't mean you have mastered controlling the airplane, but I'd imagine that after a thousand hours of doing basic maneuvers and tightening your tolerances there's not much more you can do without buckling down and getting time in an acrobatic.
You just have to get good enough within the first few hundred (or first thousand, if you've got quite a bankroll) hours to convince someone else to subsidize you.
> "He had almost no experience and even less interest in the sport."
How can someone truly excel in a vocation they don't love. Without that love is his practice going to be effective compared to that of someone who loves golf and wants to submerge themselves in it every waking hour?
Something missing from this story: money. How does this guy pay for six years of training (doing what he wants) with no income? I guess the lecture circuit and some Nike sponsorship, but will that be enough to pay rent, food, travel and maybe support a family?
I have a different theory. When it comes to seriously major ambitions e.g. PGA tour, chess GM forget 10,000 hours because it is way simpler - if at first you don't succeed...give up. You probably don't have the freakish level of god given talent required.
It depends on the sport. For example Javier Sotomayor (high jumper) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javier_Sotomayor - made it from 0 to no.5 in 4 years, and there are other examples in this particular sport where people made it in 2 years or so. That's one of the reason I don't appreciate any sport, it depends on lots of factors apart from your mental discipline (golf is more or less only mental discipline OTOH).
>'Dan spent last month in St. Petersburg because winters are winters in the Pacific Northwest. "If I could become a professional golfer," he said one afternoon, "the world is literally open to any options for anybody."'
// The world is 'open to any options for anybody' who can write a novel book, do a lecture and has $100,000 USD to fall back on whilst they train for their new venture ...
If he's done the experiment first, then written the book and done the lectures it would have a greater validity IMO.
It's far more reasonable to change this to a challenge to become a scratch golfer or something similar. I don't think Gladwell meant that anyone could become one of the best in the world at anything with 10,000 hours of work. Such a statement is somewhat insulting to those that have devoted their life to their craft. Instead, that with 10,000 hours you could become very good at anything. Enough so that you could be considered very skilled/knowledgable in that craft/field.
The "challenge" isn't to become a PGA golfer or anything like that. There isn't any predetermined mark of how "good" he needs to become in order to succeed. It's an open-ended experiment into how far 10,000 hours can take you.
Setting one milestone as your "goal" hinders your ability to reach the thousands of other possible milestones.
But the title is can he become a golf pro. There wouldn't be over a 100 comments here if it simply said "How good of a golfer can you be with 10,000 hours of practice?"
I guess, but that title seems to be chosen by the submitter/publication. To quote directly from the article:
"Basically," he told the people at the conference, "what I'm trying to do with this project is demonstrate how far you're able to go if you're willing to put in the time.
This is right out of the book "Talent is overrated"[0]. Given enough time and the proper amount of coaching & practice, a person can become a star. The key isn't to just play golf, but rather to get proper feedback from a trained professional who knows how to practice.
I have a friend who can do anything with a golfball. He is literally amazing. As an amateur he was one of the very best, but he freely admits he cannot succeed as a golfer because he just does not have the right mental makeup.
He will sink 6 foot putts all day in practice but ask him to sink a six footer with a tournament at stake and he just cannot do it reliably.
Being great at something is often not just about skill or love of the activity but also you "gotta have the right stuff"
Yeah, but you're just drawing the line between "result of effort" and "inner nature" in a different place.
What if you decided to test the hypothesis that it was inner nature which allowed you to deal with tournament stakes? What if that was learnable after all? Maybe the top performers just had a different set of experiences, one that allows them to be more detached.
I have no doubt that inner nature can be learned or at the very least improved. People are complex and the stated reasons are very seldom the real reasons. My friend may just be saying what sounds logical rather than the real reason.
If you read the book "Talent is Overrated", the theory being put forth alongside "10,000 hours to master something" is there is no such thing as natural talent. Every baby has the same talents at birth.
Tiger Woods was not born great. His father had him swinging a golf club from before he could walk.
I contacted Dan and suggested he try to find interested neurosci guys to scan his brain as he progresses, he's going to do so (local uni) tomorrow, very cool.
I doubt that he'll be able to get to a professional level when he's not passionate about golf. At least I never excelled at things I wasn't passionate about.
Actually there are a number of sports in which are age and genetics are far less important than golf, e.g. the Olympic sports of curling, bob sled racing, archery, equestrian, target shooting and sailing.
Anyone's reflexes will decline with age, so Dan's choice is of golf is a good one with respect to his slower reflexes as a potential golf pro in his late 30s, as compared to the reflexes of 20 year old potential golf pros, are not such a big deal.
I have to presume you're taking some offense at a perceived slight against golf?
Of all sports, I think it's fair to say age and genetics are less important in golf than, say, football. bayleo's statement seems fairly accurate to me.
If you're implying that age and genetics do play a big role you're right, but what other "proper" sport is comparable? Most sports nowadays are dominated by folks who are clearly genetic freaks.
He's not self-taught, he has a coach. They actually have what looks to me to be a non-orthodox system where he only practices shots from x feet when he is good at shots from x-1 feet. A depth-first approach to learning the game as opposed to a breadth-first approach.
What I find interesting about that is that you can only pursue it if you are really committed in advance. Someone who doesn't know that they are going to stick with it has to try to learn everything at once. Since he "knows" (for some suitable value) that he's sticking with it for 10,000 hours, if the first 1,000 are spent on putting, no problem. I don't know if this is optimal, but it's interesting.
I agree, and it's also unlikely that most people would even stumble upon this approach. Most people pursue golf because they enjoy it, on some level. I assume that would involve actually playing full games of golf pretty early on.
Although, now that I think about it, his approach is how we teach many academic subjects. A freshmen physics major often has no idea what it looks like to be a practicing physicist, much in the same way that someone who only works on short-range putting would know what a full game of golf is like. (Aside from cultural awareness, of course.)
But it's not how Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is usually taught. Yeah, people may not do any live rolling their first few classes, but they usually get to it after several. While people are often encouraged to focus on one aspect of their game, free live rolling is there from the beginning.
It is interesting. I'm contemplating writing a book on beginning programming, and am tempted to do such a "depth first" approach, but the problem is indeed how to do so without losing most who want to start at Hello World and get to writing applications in 16 weeks flat with minimal effort. When the student and teacher are moving at right angles, what to do? This guy, if he follows through will be a guide and inspiration to many. If.
Golf certainly lends itself to this versus other vocations.
Why do you say that? I can't think of many that don't lend itself to that. Programming? Math? Chess? Plumbing? Carpentry? Tax accountant? Table tennis? Nurse?
I think the vocations where this seems unlikely to work are rare. Basketball -- due to height, and sprinting, due to the pure athleticism required, being probably the biggest ones I can think of.
Mathematics is notoriously famous for being dominated by the young. In more recent times, as more depth is required to break new ground, mathematicians have been making breakthroughs at slightly older ages... but they started just as young. In a sense, it's even more exclusive now. The current experts are still extremely bright people who developed exceptional abilities in their 20's, but then they had to keep on grinding further just to get caught up with the current state of their specialty.
In fact, the situation with chess is very similar. I'd say go with either nurse, or tax accountant since they are in demand and still pay well even if you don't have sufficient talent and/or early training to become the best.
> Why do you say that? I can't think of many that don't lend itself to that. Programming? Math? Chess? Plumbing? Carpentry? Tax accountant? Table tennis? Nurse?
Golf probably has the advantage that it is easier to measure or judge someone's performance than some of the things you mentioned. While practice certainly helps with all of them, I would think that it would be quite hard to objectively evaluate the skill of a mathematician or a plumber in comparison.
Not so much moderated - some links are occasionally killed, usually as spam. How is setting out on a new venture to both succeed technically and profesionally - and test a hypothesis that has been bandied about HN quite a bit - not hacking related?
Good question. The problem with soccer is that it is a team sport, so individual success is more difficult to gauge than with golf. It is also not very well-recognized in the US. Memorizing the Bible would be fascinating but it's not really in line with the whole 10K hour to become a pro at something, though I could see something like this making it to the front page of HN.
The "10,000 hours" concept is a popular meme among hackers & entrepreneurs. Many of us are excited to see someone studying/testing it with such deliberation.
Without trying to be condescending, no. I am not a golf fan, and I already know that practice makes perfect. If I were to devote 10000 hours of my life in something it would be more "cerebral" than a motor skill/sport. Just my point of view.
For example: if this guy decided to devote 10000 hours to make a machine that would connect and download golf into his brain, now that would be cool.
Certainly practice approches perfect.
The interesting part here is to quantify the practice to perfection radio in the context of the well known 10,000hr rule. Golf works well for this since it's fairly objective at the individual level.
I'm not interested in golf, but I found it interesting to read through the article and see I thought his use of golf as a skill had some merit, but also where I think he's a bit off. Regardless of the outcome, I hope he follows through and documents well.
That said, I definitely pick up what you're putting down on the 'cerebral' aspect.
See i think his choice of golf (or most sports where you rely mostly on repetitive physical training) is a bad one. It's like a brute force attack - effective, but not much of an achievement.
This is such a fluff article. Why is it interesting that someone is attempting to "try really hard at something for a lengthy period time"? Looks like he is pitching for a book deal and a spot on Oprah. When you consider how much time 10k hours is I don't think it will blow anyone away that practice of that magnitude will bring success.
What I love about this guy's mission (and why I'm rooting for him) is because he is simply and intensely applying a theory. Succeed or fail, he won't prove (or disprove) the theory, but it will be a fascinating data point for us all.