It's unclear if Dan McLaughlin will ever be a great golfer, but he is very good at self-promotion. He got Nike to sponsor him as a golfer even though he had never hit a golf ball or watched a golf tournament on television.
McLaughlin decided to become a professional after reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," which examines K. Anders Ericsson's study that says it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master any skill. So, right after turning 30 last year, he quit his job, built a website, hired a coach, and decided to live off the $100,000 he had saved. He is now on the "Dan Plan" which involves golfing for 10,000 hours--which will take six and a half years of full-time commitment--with the goal of becoming one of the roughly 250 men on the PGA tour.
When McLaughlin called Ericsson at Florida State University, where he teaches psychology, the creator of the 10,000 hours rule figured McLaughlin would quit soon after starting. Ericsson believes that only deliberate practice--intensely focused time spent trying to improve--causes progress. "Most people on a job spend 10,000 hours and they are at the level they started out," he says. "You can count the hours people drive and you're not going to see a high correlation to skill. You have to try to stretch yourself and attain higher levels of control."
McLaughlin is focused on golf--and now the experiment has taken its own momentum. He counts only about six hours a day, six days a week as official hours, but he probably spends 50 hours a week on the Dan Plan if you include workouts with his official trainer, reading about golf, and entering his meticulous stats from his notebook into his spreadsheets. He already is an inspirational story for a lot of fans who find his website.
McLaughlin played his first round in August, but it wasn't until November that he got his final club--the driver--to begin using. He remains upbeat. He's added, on Ericsson's recommendation, a mental coach, to make sure he's doing the kind of deliberate practice Ericsson suggests.
Source: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, November 28, 2011