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.
Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
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Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#12This 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.
Here's the about page from his blog: http://breakparblueprint.com/blog/about-2/
That is apparently, his new blog migrated from the original, found here: http://scratchtoscratch.wordpress.com/
The big thing was the time and effort investment: over 70,000 practice balls, and 2,000 hours in a year (that's close to a full-time job).
He actually ended up writing a book about it:
http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Hack-Golfers-Challenge-Break/dp/...
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#13[deleted]
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.
> 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.
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#14I'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.
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#15To 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."
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#16Here's his blog with some updated info: http://dannychampion.com/blog.php 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.
Sports training usually shows diminishing returns. In particular, if you overtrain you plateau or get worse.
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#17I'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…
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.
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#18[deleted]
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.
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#19I'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…
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.
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#20I'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…
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?