Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of 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"

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.

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.

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.

I upvoted your comment to agree with your recommendation of the definitive book on the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

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

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

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.