Three years ago, I blogged about the “10,000 Hour Rule” popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers”. The theory says that becoming an expert in any complex skill requires 10,000 hours of practice, or about 10 years at 20 hours per week. In that blog, I mentioned Dan McLaughlin, who in 2010 decided to test the 10,000 hour rule in a big way – by leaving his job as a photographer and dedicating 10,000 hours over six years to learn to golf well enough to do it professionally.
I liked the idea of the 10,000 hour rule because it meant that we’re largely in control of our own destiny; our level of skill correlates to our level of dedication over time.
I remained curious whether Dan would be able to become a professional golfer just by deciding to do it and putting in the time. This week, I checked his progress three years later. While I was at it, I checked the web for more recent articles on the 10,000 hour rule.
Since Gladwell wrote his book, there appear to have been more detractors than proponents of the 10,000 hour theory. Many view it as too simplistic because other factors are important – raw talent, the age a person starts an activity, the quality of practice sessions. A Princeton study researched the value of practice across a number of fields and found it accounted for a relatively small difference in performance (1-26%). Also, 10,000 hours was not found to be a magic number. Among chess players recently studied, the amount of practice needed to achieve master status varied from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means one player needed 22 times more practice than another to become a master! So while all agree that practice improves performance, it is not the dominant factor, nor is there a magic number of hours.
Ok, that’s what some studies say. How is the aspiring professional golfer’s test of the 10,000 hour rule? Since 2010, he has kept his singular focus and has continued to practice golf almost full time every week. He has transformed from an unremarkable golfer to being in the top 1% of golfers in the world with a handicap around 4. That is amazing progress. To me, his seems to have been a successful test of the rule. However, his goal has been to become a professional golfer and that requires that he improve even further. So whether he succeeds remains to be seen. He now estimates that he will not finish 10,000 hours of practice until 2018 because maintaining a pace of 36 hours of golf a week turned out to be unrealistic. While he has enjoyed his challenge and kept his good humor, he now estimates his chances of playing in the PGA tour as about 25%.
I look forward to seeing how Dan’s journey ends.