Cool story. My question is, if you were going to do the same thing, what skill would you try and master?
Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
131–140 of 173 posts
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#132I'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…
A 2:40 time isn't terrible - even at the Olympic level: http://www.iaaf.org/oly08/results/eventCode=3659/bydisciplin...
(Of course, most of these guys had to do better than 2:40 to qualify, but still..)
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#133I 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…
How many hours of golf do you estimate you have played? At what point did you become "good"? Saying you've been playing for 19 years means nothing. That could be 1 hour a week or 40 hours a week.
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.
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#134This 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 t…
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.
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#136Earlier 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.
That was my first thought as well.
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#137I 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'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…
"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.
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"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…
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.
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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.
Re: Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
#140To 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 recent…
What is the good music theory book in question?