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.