from Amazon
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Greatness by perspiration
I love that someone is doing it:
What he really wanted to do was test the 10,000-hour theory he read about in the Malcolm Gladwell bestseller Outliers. That, Gladwell wrote, is the amount of time it takes to get really good at anything — “the magic number of greatness.”
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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.”
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The 10,000-hour concept, though, is based on academic research into the idea that success is a choice — made, not born. At first glance, it feels like a very American idea — you can be anything you want to be — but it is an unsentimental view of the world. It helps to be tall in basketball, and it helps to start violin lessons at a young age, but what separates the few truly great from the many merely good is not talent or magic or luck. It’s dedication and discipline. The secret to success isn’t a secret. It’s work.
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Here’s how they have Dan trying to learn golf: He couldn’t putt from 3 feet until he was good enough at putting from 1 foot. He couldn’t putt from 5 feet until he was good enough putting from 3 feet. He’s working away from the hole. He didn’t get off the green for five months. A putter was the only club in his bag. Everybody asks him what he shoots for a round. He has no idea. His next drive will be his first. In his month in Florida, he worked as far as 50 yards away from the hole. He might — might — have a full set of clubs a year from now.
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“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. “I’m testing human potential.” Everybody in the classroom clapped for Dan and his plan.
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But never, not in anything, according to Ericsson, has anyone done it like this: to start at this age, with no experience, and to keep statistics from the beginning, and to be so self-reflective about it, and to last even this long.
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Unrelated story:
I picked up my first golf club when I was in my 20s, the kind of thing you pick up for company shindigs. I have a good baseball swing (can go opposite field well), but that is terrible for golf (huge slices). I think my first golf score was 132. I remember when I broke 100 the first time, I was in Calgary (and my first game there.. shot a 96, which was about 10 strokes better than I shot in Montreal as of that time). I have to believe a good golf course must help substantially, because I only broke 100 once in Montreal.
I also insisted to use a crappy driver. I saw my buddies who play scratch golf use these fantastic 400$ drivers, light, with enormous heads. It was impossible to make a bad shot with those. But me, I reasoned that it was more important to handicap myself with a crappy driver that was unforgiving if you miss your shot. My whole golf set cost under 100$, and for a weekend golfer like me (10-15 times a year for 5-6 years), I figured that was just fine.
Anyway, my buddy picked up the sport at the exact same time as I did. But what he did was ONLY use the 5-iron and the putter. That’s it. Off the tee, out of the sand. In any situation, it was the 5-iron. He reasoned that it was too hard for us too learn to use each of the clubs in the bag, and so, why not get really good using just two clubs.
It was an interesting and unintended experiment. And we pretty much shot the same. But he had more fun that I did. To him, he was learning, and to me, I was surviving. It would be the equivalent of him always driving in the middle lane come hell or high water, while I switch lanes continuously. But when all is said and done, both of us arrive at the destination at the same time.
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His website is at The Dan Plan.
Glove-slap: NaOH