141–150 of 173 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
do you have a citation or any evidence for this?
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.
It Depends.... 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…
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.
In any case I hope this guy makes it!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
10,000 hours is an awful lot of golf - 20 hours a week for 10 years. Seems to match up with your estimates pretty well.
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...
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.
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 str…
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.
So here are the numbers, in short, for mastery:
It takes about 10k hours of practice.
It takes about 10 years.
That means about 3 hours of practice everyday. Everyday.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm thinking a book deal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 expe…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?"
"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.