Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?
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What I love about this guy's mission (and why I'm rooting for him) is because he is simply and intensely applying a theory. Succeed or fail, he won't prove (or disprove) the theory, but it will be a fascinating data point for us all.
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."
I always have loved dancing, but only did that in discos and partying, taking no classes. Then I started going to some classes (bollywood dancing) in 2008. That wasn't it yet.
September 2009 I started doing lindy hop, I love it. If I could devote even more time to it I would, but it's hard to do with a full-time job that pays for the dancing and some family debt. I was 34 then, and some time later I started keeping an approximate account of how much have I done, classes and social dancing, to have an idea of how much it would take to get to the 10k hours to be really good(yeah, I heard of it too).
Now I have about around 694 hours of lindy-related dances (287 classes, 309 social, 91 solo charleston and some tap, blues to the side) and I'm starting to be good enough to recognise most of my failings without help.
It's not as impressive as what he does, but it's about 11 hours of dancing a week this year, while keeping a full-time job, being a bit sleep-deprived because of night parties, and trying to live as frugal as I can in order to have money for classes, international workshops and parties almost every day of the week.
Yeah, this means that if this (10k hours) is true I'd need a bit more than 20 years to get to be exceptional. Well, at least I will get good at this thing I love.
As his family and advisors reported in the article, this isn't just different from what he's done before, it's different from what most (all?) people have done before.
I haven't read "Outliers" yet, but from what I've gathered about it I think the biggest thing Gladwell fails to mention is the single-minded drive and zealous mission that's inherent in true outliers. Read the biography of any extraordinary performer (Buffett, Steve Jobs, Rockefeller, Ted Williams, Michael Jackson...) and you get the sense that they were willing to die for it. They didn't do it to test theories or even test their potential. Their craft defined their entire existence. It was their all and everything, it was their life.
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 strength and muscle memory). Even if this guy can learn to hit the ball 300 yards, it will take him at least 10 years if not longer to get the mental comfort required to play effectively in front of thousands of people and successfully place or win an event.
2. The 10,000 hour rule is best applied to things like coding or langauge learning, in other words, low pressure learning environments that have structured guidelines to success. Golf, beyond mental and physical, requires great feel. To be able to know that in 15 mile an hour wind, with your ball half buried by sand, and water in front of the green, how would one hit that shot? There are millions of variations of what you could end up with on the golf course, none that could be figured out in 10,000 hours. We haven't even talked about the putting green yet. Yikes
3. I've seen this before, over a dozen times. Guy gets tired of his job, has some talent and decides to take a ton of golf lessons and practice hard to go for the tour. At least the guys Im referring to played college golf. This guy didn't so much as do that.
4. Golf is seriously hard and the difference between the best players and the mediocre pro players most of the time is just an average difference of a few shots. To shave off those few shots is next to impossible once you've reached your peak potential.
Golf is not for everyone. This guy is wasting his time.
Update ( I forgot something):
Here is another reason why this is a pointless ambition.
5. 10,000 hours of golf is a lot different than 10,000 of something like...learning a language (we'll use this again). To become good at golf does not mean that you can sit on the driving range and hit golf balls every day until your hands bleed. To become a great player, one must get great at playing the golf course. To play one round of golf takes between 3-5 hours (depending on where you play), and there is no guarantee that those 5 hours spent on the course are in any way productive to your progress. That is not a good use of time spent in his quest for 10,000 hours. Someone could certainly guarantee that in 5 focused hours of a spanish tutoring session that they have progresses. With golf, a bad round could send you right back to the drawing board.
One's brain will typically dismiss a "n00b" trying to become good at something that one is good at without the experience that one has. I believe this is possible because if they do succeed it will invalidate ones own experience which can be a reality our brain wishes to shelter us from.
To make this more relevant to our industry I occasionally bump into the same problem when applying for coding jobs due to my lack of degree and the possession of a degree by the person advertising for the position.
People want to believe that what they do is so hard that it requires many years of practice, but in reality it's often just not true.
Despite a highly competent coach and many hours of practice, it ended badly IIRC.
http://www.golf.com/golf/tours_news/article/0,28136,2056371,...
This in particular was useful to read:
"That was the weird thing about Barkley. You did fix him. On the range and on the simulator, he had 300-yard drives. He couldn't take it to the course. He had the mental full-swing yips, and you had him killing it.
Yeah, the change was that before he couldn't do it on the range. Now he can do it on the range, but still can't do it on the course. So he's playing left-handed now. He's actually pretty good.
It's bizarre that a professional athlete wouldn't be physically able to do it.
He is physically able to, he isn't mentally able to. It's bizarre when somebody shoots less than 50 percent from the foul line, it's bizarre when Chuck Knobloch can't throw it to first base, it's bizarre when Rick Ankiel throws 18 pitches in a row to the backstop. But it happens."
I had to look up Rick Ankiel. Interesting story of what sounds like a complete mental breakdown of a skill. Tiger Woods seems to be going through a minor form of this now.
How is this relevant?
Saying you've been playing for 19 years means nothing. That could be 1 hour a week or 40 hours a week.
If he were to integrate your exact points into his training, it certainly sounds like enough time to resolve your issues.
Dan had no bad golf habits to break and has been coached from the very first stroke. Suppose Dan can be coached not to lose his temper? Suppose Dan can be coached to recover mentally from a poor shot? Furthermore, with an exercise coach hopefully Dan can avoid the injuries that plague golf pros.
Update in response to your update: Coaching is what makes hours of practice productive. Bad days reinforce bad habits. Dan is already playing a variety of geographically dispersed golf courses and is accustomed to bad weather. According to his blog posts, his recent bad days result in better scores than his good days just a few weeks earlier.
Jason, think back over your golf career - wonder how much better you could have been with no bad habits to unlearn, and constant comprehensive coaching.
Nike is wise to back Dan. What a story!
This is not an insult, especially as he had to earn it to even have it; it is a folly I find myself making often as well. Once you have beat something into yourself so thoroughly it feels like second nature, even you begin to suspect maybe it really was second nature after all.
I can recommend reading "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance", it paints a clear pictures of what Expertise actually is.
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.
10,000 hours is a long time, what makes you think it is not enough time to acquire a great feel for golf? How long did it take you to acquire your great feel?
"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 expertise in some small way, and perhaps he will have opened up some new avenues for exploration.
Personally I don't know if I could put 10K hours into something that I wasn't really enjoying, coding? sure, golfing? not so much. (even though I was employee #9 at GolfWeb :-)) So on that level I think his experiment is doubly valuable.
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't get good enough to be anything other than a children's golf instructor at a suburban course in Ohio, but... hey, I learned that I'm actually not all that good at golf."
Lets say he does make it into the PGA, and plays for four years and doesn't win a single tournament but finishes in the money in all of them. (note that generally the top 70 or so players all get some money [1]) Depending on his walk through that distribution he has a good shot at making a million dollars over four years ($250K/yr). Which would be the equivalent of having made 100K/yr for 10yrs.
The payment schedule is another area where the PGA differs greatly from other sports which appear to have a much shallower 'money' pool. (I'm familiar with Golf, less so with say Nascar racing or Tennis for example).
The other assumption in your response is this one "but... hey, I learned that I'm actually not all that good at golf." which is at the heart of the whole Expertise/Outliers debate.
The hypothesis is that there is a 'base level' of expertise which anyone can achieve with 10,000 hrs of focused practice. And once you have invested that time the difference between your performance and that of someone who was 'gifted from birth' will normalize out, or more precisely winning or losing becomes more statistical rather than expertise related.
No doubt he's getting some sponsorship money from Nike and others who are betting that he will generate enough publicity like this to put their brand in front of others who are attracted by his story, so earning potential isn't exactly 'wasted' so much as 'different.' It wasn't clear from the original article to me what sort of pay scale he might expect 'working for the man' as it were. So its hard to evaluate the opportunity cost of that path.
So if the hypothesis is correct, and he's rigorous in his training/practice, then he will make back much more than his 'earning potential' over those 6 years. Much like an investor listening to a start-up pitch which will take 6 years to disrupt the market. Give the guy credit for going 'all in'.
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.
Second, I said closer to 100,000 than 10,000. So I'm taking the over on 55k hours. Although I do think 100k is possible, even if unlikely(say 4-5 hours a day from 2-21, then 18 a day from 21-present). I do think he's probably averaged more than 8 hours a day since he turned pro if you include all activities that are meant to improve his ability on the golf course. That's clearly pretty close to the upper bound but more likely than 10k.
Finally I agree that it's dismissive towards incredible golfers and I think that's why it's so many people looked at the article and commented here. I have no doubt that if someone puts in 10k hours over 6 years they would likely be a damn good golfer(better than scratch) but touring pro level is very unlikely. The issue in my mind that this article is stupid because either 1) It's obvious that you could get very good but perhaps not incredible at something after 10k hours of practice or 2) because we go by the title and realize that becoming a touring pro after not touching a golf club in the first 30 years of your life is not at all likely.
If you actually read the article, he doesn't so much care about making it pro. "He grants that there's a "99 percent chance I'm not going to become a PGA golfer ... Basically, 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."
1. It helps to get started out right with no bad habits to unlearn. For example, I started playing disc golf and I got on a forum and everyone said "Start with a putter and nothing else." Two years later I have what might be called a fairway driver(innova Gazelle) as my fastest disc in the bag. I can play against guys that are throwing discs 2x or even 3x faster than I am and I compete against them pretty well. My shots aren't as far, but they are better shaped and more accurate. I can also putt much better than them. If you start out how he did learning how to putt first and working backwards you will have a very solid game. Did you do this?
2 You need dedicated practice, not just any practice. The time you dick around with friends, try trick shots, go out and drink some beer don't count. Most people spend a large part of their 'practice' doing this. I was putting 1,000+ times a night to improve my putting game and that was deliberate, dedicated practice.
3.I would agree with you if you would have said, "This guy has no history of sticking with anything." The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. It's going to take a lot to change his behavior and stick with it. But the fact that he hasn't touched a golf club isn't going to hold him back.
I believe this guy is adding significantly to the sport of golf, human behavior research, and just doing awesome experiments. Congrats to him, and I wish him the best!
There's a difference between making the case that someone can do something because you have experience in doing it and making the case that someone can't because you haven't. There are presumably quite a few people who've tried an approach similar to yours, but there aren't that many who have tried Dan's approach... yet.
I am sure that I like his approach a damn sight better than yours. The guy is _working_. He'll have to beat all sorts of inner demons to get to 10,000 hours. He'll end up knowing a lot about learning, and himself, when he's done. That's my kind of guy.
Meanhwile, you are lobbing poorly thought-out downerisms. "get great at playing the course"? Gee, do you think maybe he'll budget some of his 10k for that? or that the ability to hit his shot straight _every_single_time_ might help? or that all those hours will do something for his mental chops? Coding "has structured guidelines for success"? None of this is intelligent, never mind constructive.
You're only 25, you were clearly a good athlete, you made YC, congratulations. No doubt worked your ass off up to this point. Well, some people have to grind it out even harder than you've had to. If you can't spare the time to think through helpful commentary, respect their dedication and keep your mouth shut.
That is exactly the point of the 10,000 hour practice - to provide a documented counterexample to that point of view, in accordance with recent theory on expertise training.
In golf (unlike most pro sports) it isn't immediately obvious that this is the case. Sure, most golfers are in shape, but few aerobically fitter than a recreational 10K runner, and the variation in max drive length between successful pros shows that strength is pretty variable too.
As an extreme example there are players like John Daly, who is overweight, smokes and is a double major winner.
As others have noted, the effort is in part a test of people's ability to enhance these endowments. I _think_ most people putting in 10,000 hours got feedback that their basic endowments give them some advantage.
I suspect that something like that will operate here. If at some point Dan hits diminishing returns, and can't punch through by varying his approach and allowing for natural human slumps, that may be a signal that he lacks the physical tools to go all the way. Even then that isn't a waste of time, he'll have learned a lot about focus, and about detecting where his natural advantages do lie. That has to inform the search for his real calling.
One way or the other, it'll be interesting.
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.
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.
I think Jason has a good point that hitting a golf ball and being able to function under pressure are two very very different abilities and professional golf is most likely selecting for both abilities.
You're saying:
Golf is mostly mental. That certainly isn't a problem: you can train mentality. In fact what you've just argued is that golf is well-suited to be conquered purely through training (among sports). Dan would have a much harder time becoming effective in basketball, where normal-size people are at a huge disadvantage off the bat.
Golf requires feel. Where do you think feel comes from? (Training!) Again, you've actually argued that golf is well-suited to Dan's approach, not the opposite.
You've seen this before. No you haven't. Come on.
Golf is hard. That's tautological. Anything that can reasonably be called an endeavor is in some sense infinitely hard. (Also: how do you know that shaving off those last few strokes is impossible once you've achieved your potential? Did you dedicate your life to golf?)
Sometimes you'll have a day of training that won't contribute to your progress. Anybody trying to learn anything will experience days like that.
This is a cool and ballsy experiment and you're being a bit of a hater. Do I think Dan will become a PGA golfer? No, but I'm looking forward to seeing him try.
Re: 1) I think the idea is that 10000 hours of practice include all aspects of the game. There is no reason why his plan can't include playing his way up through all grades of tournaments and working on his mental game.
2) That sounds exactly like the kind of experience turned into intuition that the human brain is good at. I don't think there is any reason to think that aspect is inbuilt (though of course it might be).
3) But 10000 hours? Thats 6 days a week for 6 years.
4) I think this guy would be very happy being a mediocre pro.
5) Yeah I'm not sure I get that point at all. You don't have to get a good score to practice attentively.
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.
[1] http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~dunning/publications/pdf/un...
It's doable, very, very unlikely I grant you, but it's doable.
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.
Overtraining is what happens when an athlete's training frequency is greater than their body's ability to recover. That is, by the time the next training sessions comes around, they haven't yet recovered from the last one. This can harm overall performance for obvious reasons.
That may lead to a plateau, but I think plateau's happen more often when the athlete ceases to learn from training sessions. And that happens when they're just doing the same thing, over and over.
All practiced activities show diminishing returns. If you practice 5 days a week (assuming your body can handle it), the benefit of practicing 6 days a week (assuming your body can handle it) is not going to be the same as going from 1 to 2 days. But if your body can handle it, you probably will still improve.
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.
So if he fails, it says nothing about the theory. Should he succeed, that's a whole another story and would be pretty exciting.
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. But everyone who spent much time doing John's directed practice can draw rings around most people with their eyes closed.
The hard part, IMHO, was putting in the time to practice and keep practicing. Even on a shitty day. This guy seems to have that down; he's been able to structure his life so that he doesn't have much to distract him from golf. If he keeps at it and doesn't get run over by a truck, I'm pretty sure he will either become a pro or burn out.
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.
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/...
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.
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.
I find it very disrespectful.
That's what I don't understand about all the negative replies in this thread. What defines a "real athlete" if it's not a whole lot of hard work? How does quantifying the effort make it less real?
// Most people don't try.
I think that most healthy people could walk (you said "run") a marathon if they desired to. even if you walked for 2 miles an hour and had a 10 minute break that would be 17 hours of effort. 3mph is the usually quoted walking speed.
Perhaps I'm wrong.
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.
Looking at the 2010 results from the NY and Boston Marathons, that's a few minutes shy of the 100th best person. Considering that those are elite races with entrants from around the world, I think his time is pretty damned good in an absolute sense, not just a relative sense. Best in the world, no. Olympic level, no. But I'd consider him elite.
And that's why this ten thousand hours thing is pretty random, yet pretty unfalsifiable. In any specialised activity, the first hundred hours of dedicated practice is good enough to make you better than most people. Keep practicing and you'll be better than 80% of the world. Keep it up for a bunch more time and you'll be better than 90% of the world. By the time the irrelevant ten thousand hours milestone pops by, you'll certainly be impressive at your activity, but whether you're in the top 5% or the top 0.001% depends on which activity you've chosen (plus your natural talent in that field).
So for some definition of "expert", it's fair to say that ten thousand hours will make you an expert.
I would be fine with that result. My objection is when people say "I'm just not good at X," when what they really mean is "I'm not as good at X as I think I should be, that frustrates me, and I lack the motivation to continue trying." If we can demonstrate that with enough practice, anyone can get good at anything (with a large delta of good), then I think that's meaningful.
If that statement is self-evident to you, I've talked to people who don't consider it so. For example, I've talked to other CS majors who think that most people just don't have the right "mind" for programming, and I've taught programming to people who said similar things.
I'd agree with that, which is a very different claim than "there's no such thing as innate talent".
I've talked to other CS majors who think that most people just don't have the right "mind" for programming
I'd also agree with that, and I don't think it's contradictory. Have you really not observed that some people pick up programming far easier than others? I believe that almost anyone can get to the point where they can write basic software, but not that everyone is capable of becoming the next Dennis Ritchie.
Put another way, people become good at things that they like because they keep doing them. We get positive reinforcement. But I don't think there are a class of people who have the "mind" for programming.
Also note that by bring up Dennis Ritchie, you've now introduced the "what does it take to be a genius" discussion, which is different from achieving expert status.
Do most people lack those necessary skills? I'm not really sure.
[1]: For the purpose of the argument, ignore prosthetics. AFAIK, there isn't anything similar to prosthetics for someone that lacks certain necessary abilities to be an "expert" programmer.
I've just been using Google to find a crisp definition of "expert" that I can cite to one of Ericsson's papers. Some of those are in nonsearchable .PDF documents. The short answer is that the formal scientific literature on acquisition of expertise does not bless anyone who desires the title "expert" with that title, but rather uses objective performance measures to identify persons with statistically reliably superior performance. I'll post this now, and look for more definitions and references, and try to edit this post during the edit time limit if I find something more on-point for you to look up. Ericsson's seminal paper on the issue
http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/course/6/6.055/readings/eric...
has already been linked to by at least two participants in this thread.
From
http://web.me.com/pw70/ACE_lab/Publications_files/2007%20Eri...
we can find this extensive discussion of the definition of expertise:
"Since [Bedard's and Chi's (1992)] review, researchers have become increasingly dissatisfied with studies that define experts by social criteria (e.g., peer nominations), by extended domain experience, or by (high) education. When scientists measured the level of real-world performance of so-called experts they found that many were not reliably better than their less-experienced colleagues. For example, reviews (Ericsson, 2006) have described studies showing that a psychotherapist’s level of education and clinical experience is unrelated to their treatment outcomes. Recent reviews of performance in health-related fields show that extended experience of doctors and nurses (beyond the first couple of years of practice) is not associated with continued improvements, as most people had thought. In fact, performance has frequently been found to decrease without continued training (Choudhry, Fletcher, & Soumerai, 2005; Ericsson 2004).
"There are numerous domains of expertise in which some performers are reproducibly superior to most others engaging in the domain.For example, chess masters, bridge experts, and experts in other games consistently beat less-skilled individuals. More generally, in the arts and the sciences some individuals reliably generate superior products that are selected for presentation in journals, conferences, and competitions. Some individuals are able to perform at a reproducibly higher level in professional domains too. Our framework focuses on understanding the mechanisms that mediate consistently superior performance, and to distinguish this approach from the traditional study of expertise we will refer to it as the expert-performance approach (see Feltovich, Prietula, & Ericsson, 2006, for a description of the historical development of several approaches to the study of expertise using psychological methods)."
In the 2010 Boston Marathon, the runners between 2:40 and 2:41 placed from 208th to 227th. This group included a man in his 50's. 2:40 is a nice PR for a hobbyist, but it was a bit much for that guy to start talking Olympics and make a documentary of himself.
http://www.marathonguide.com/results/browse.cfm?MIDD=1510041...
2. Even Gladwell isn't stupid enough to say that it's sufficient to put in 10,000 hours, he just implies it.
(Of course, most of these guys had to do better than 2:40 to qualify, but still..)
Actually, I was too generous. He only did 3h10.
From forum comments (not mine):
I have to say after being an early supporter of this project I
totally lost interest. I initially felt inspired by Vero's enthusiasm
and drive and a feeling that "anybody could do it" in an American
dream kind of way. Not sure if it was injury, but why didn't he
run Amsterdam?http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance also covers a wide range of research on performance and expertise in various areas http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...
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.
The next argument I hear from a lot of my golfing buddies is that they'll practice hard and play the Senior Tour (Champions Tour). Beating Bubba Watson, for example, in 20 years when he's eligible for the Champions tour is like beating Usain Bolt in a 100 yard dash after giving him a 3 second head start. Won't make good television.
A few books have been written on the subject where reporters try to qualify for the tour.
That being said, it's actually doable, highly unlikely, but doable. I like his chances at becoming a pro golfer (not on the PGA Tour, but maybe the Hooters or Tar Heel Tour) better than his chances of becoming a starting pitcher, running back, point guard, goalie or professional driver in other pro sports. Golf, the game is tremendously "fair".
I'd say excellence is a necessary precursor to going pro, but is itself not sufficent. That extra push is some magic combination of genetics, upbringing and opportunity (nature and nurture coming together just so) - all along with the drive and experience to become excellent.
My perspective on this is based on my experience in playing tennis for 10,000+ hours (not apples-to-apples, obviously, but still relatively close) and becoming good enough to know that there would be absolutely no point in trying to play full-time professionally, because I was too slow to ever reach a level where I could make money while touring. There's a lot more money in golf, but it also is a lot more expensive (many golf mini-tours pay prize money out of the sizable entry fees they charge...$1k/tourney entry fee is common for small pro golf tourneys) and there's a lot more marginal pro-level players around for the golf tournaments since there aren't nearly as many physical factors in golf as there are in tennis.
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.ht...
and especially the most classic paper in the literature
http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...
is not that 10,000 hours is enough, but rather that deliberate practice is strictly necessary for expertise, and that 10,000 hours (in round figures) is also necessary to achieve what can properly be called expertise in any adult domain of performance. K. Anders Ericsson, the leading researcher in this field, distinguishes "playful engagement" from "deliberate practice" and distinguishes being at the journeyman level of performance from the rarer case of being at the expert level of performance.
What needs more testing is whether 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is not only necessary but also sufficient. Many critiques of Ericsson's findings evoke an ill-defined latent quality labeled "talent" to make the claim that many members of the general public would fail to achieve expertise even if they engaged in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. But such a showing would not be a direct refutation of Ericsson's claim. Rather, it would be necessary to show that someone who is properly called an expert lacked opportunity to engage in lengthy deliberate practice. Mozart didn't write any music composition that musicologists call a "masterpiece" until he had had ten years (and at least 10,000 hours) of intensive study of music guided by his father, who was an author of innovative books on music instruction and a continual guide to young Wolfgang's musical development.
So really all you have to afford out of your own pocket is enough time to get your commercial certificate and be employable for flight instruction, skydiving, crop dusting, banner towing, or any of the other "entry level" pilot jobs out there.
Certainly getting your license doesn't mean you have mastered controlling the airplane, but I'd imagine that after a thousand hours of doing basic maneuvers and tightening your tolerances there's not much more you can do without buckling down and getting time in an acrobatic.
> "He had almost no experience and even less interest in the sport."
How can someone truly excel in a vocation they don't love. Without that love is his practice going to be effective compared to that of someone who loves golf and wants to submerge themselves in it every waking hour?
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.
>'Dan spent last month in St. Petersburg because winters are winters in the Pacific Northwest. "If I could become a professional golfer," he said one afternoon, "the world is literally open to any options for anybody."'
// The world is 'open to any options for anybody' who can write a novel book, do a lecture and has $100,000 USD to fall back on whilst they train for their new venture ...
If he's done the experiment first, then written the book and done the lectures it would have a greater validity IMO.
Setting one milestone as your "goal" hinders your ability to reach the thousands of other possible milestones.
"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.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-Separates-World-Class...
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"
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!
braces for down votes from Golf fans
After all, Tiger Woods was once a novice.
For example: if this guy decided to devote 10000 hours to make a machine that would connect and download golf into his brain, now that would be cool.
I'm not interested in golf, but I found it interesting to read through the article and see I thought his use of golf as a skill had some merit, but also where I think he's a bit off. Regardless of the outcome, I hope he follows through and documents well.
That said, I definitely pick up what you're putting down on the 'cerebral' aspect.