Will 10 000 Hours of Deliberate Practice Make You a Golf Pro?

A test of the 10 000 hours mastery method — The Dan Plan

In April 2010, Dan McLoughlin decided to quit his job and with zero previous experience in the game, dedicate 10 000 hours of practice to golf. At the age of 30, he wanted to find out if it was possible to qualify for the PGA Tour. He had a very modest athletic background, having played a bit of tennis as a kid and done some running in high school. He wasn’t a couch potato, but not an athlete either. This was an experiment to see how far it was possible to go if you put in the time and effort. The project was called The Dan Plan.

Why?

The challenge would investigate how far you can develop your talent if you put everything into it. With a sample size of one, the result will not necessarily prove anything, but if he makes it, he has shown that it’s possible. It was an experiment to explore his inner potential and to document that progress is inevitable when you put in the right sorts of practice.

One of the main goals of the Dan Plan was to inspire others to start similar projects and believe that they can learn anything. Before he started, he said that if it inspires even one person to quit their job and find happiness in their own plan, then the Dan Plan is a success. Dan hoped to prove that it’s never too late to start a new learning project in life.

The theory

According to research by Dr. Karl Anders Ericsson, talent has little to do with success. Instead, it’s the amount of deliberate practice that makes a difference. Deliberate practice is an effortful activity designed to improve target performance. Ericsson’s research has found that a minimum of 10 000 hours of deliberate practice is necessary to become world-class in established fields. Dan wanted to test the theory and aimed for 10 000 hours of deliberate golf practice.

Golf seemed like the perfect sport to test out this theory. Golf is objective, and it’s easy to measure progress, as it has a world-wide handicapping system.

Dan spoke with Dr. Ericsson before starting his practice routine. Originally, he had planned to practice for 10 hours a day, six days a week and get to the 10 000 hour mark in about 3.5 years. But after consulting with Ericsson about concentration levels and how much learning you can absorb per day, he realised that it was going to be a much longer project. Ten hours a day of practice would also have been impossible to maintain physically, and would with high likelihood lead to injury and burnout.

The project

Dan started the 10 000 hour journey with just a putter. He started one foot from the hole, where he stayed until he had a 100 per cent success rate. This took him a day.

His putting goals were to increase the distance he put from, to 3 feet, then 5, 10, 20, 40 and so on, until he had reached the PGA average from each distance. He thought it would take a month to succeed at this, but it ended up being a lot harder than he imagined.

After a day of 3-footers, his average was 63.73%. And after a month of just putting from this distance, his percentage was up to 84.8%. It took him another few weeks to reach 90%+, the score he needed to reach his goal. It took even longer to reach a level of 80%+ at 5-footers. Eventually, after five months of putting, he received his second club, a pitching wedge.

He had a similar strategy with the pitching wedge. And after five months of putting, he was ecstatic to finally see the ball in the air. He started just outside the green, chipping it in, gradually increasing the distance from the hole. After ten months he finally started to ‘play’ some golf. From about 30 metres, he tried to chip the ball onto the green, and then use a maximum of two putts to get it in the hole. Almost a year after he started, Dan took his first swing-lesson. About an hour a day, he started working on distance shots, between 30 and 100 metres. But the majority of the time, he was still working on the putts and chips from the distances he had already worked through. His primary focus was to reinforce and maintain the parts of his game that he had previously learned. He didn’t want to forget the skills he had learnt already.

After 18 months of full-time play, he hit a driver for the first time, and he shortly after acquired his first full set of golf clubs as he had been invited to play on a professional golf course. Dan shot a 94 on the first course, and 98 on the second, in his first full round of golf.

Since then, he has learnt the distance of the other clubs but still focused on his mechanics and his short game. According to Dan’s findings, that’s the part of the game that most differentiates a decent and a professional player. If you can get the ball in the hole in 2–3 strokes, anywhere within 100 metres, you will get a solid score.

What counts as an hour?

The important thing for Dan was not just to do the project, but to do it right. He went all-in and invested all the money he had planned to use for graduate studies. He didn’t want to have any regrets. This meant that a typical day consisted of 4–6 hours standing over a ball, hitting strokes. The rest of the day he was involved in supporting activities, such as working out, watching film, or reading about swing theory or meditation. Only the hours where he was working with a ball counted towards the 10 000 hours of deliberate practice, but supporting activities were also crucial to perform. There is a limit to how much physical workout you can do in a day, so performing mental exercises can give you more practice hours per day. It is however, important to do, not overdo it, as there are limits to how much the human brain and body can process, and at some point, rest and recovery may be more beneficial than more practice.

Results

Dan practised 1.5 years before he went on his first full round of golf, meaning that he didn’t have a handicap before then. Instead, he improved his percentages of making shots from different distances.

His first handicap after practising for two years was 8.7, and after about another year, he was down to a 6.2 handicap. In another year, he was down to a handicap of 3.3. At his peak, he had a 2.8 handicap, and for most of his fifth year as a player he had a handicap of about 3. This put him in the top 4 per cent of the 26 million golfers in the US.

As he was approaching the 6000-hour mark of practice, disaster struck. Dan suddenly felt a terrible pain in his lower back. As he was hitting a drive, it felt like something had stung his lower back. He wasn’t able to hit the next shot, and could barely walk off the course.

Injury

Dan found that he had a slipped disc in his lower back, making it very painful to practice. Probably a result of hitting too many balls. Golf can be a very straining sport, with all the powerful repetitions of the same movement, always twisting to the same side.

You need a healthy body to follow through with your training. As a professional in any sport, it is crucial to take care of your body and do a lot of injury prevention practice, to decrease your likelihood of being on the sidelines.

Dan had to stop his practice while missing 4018 hours. Up until then, he was making good progress, and we will never know if he would have qualified for the PGA-tour. It would have been very challenging, even if he had stayed injury-free, but now we will unfortunately not find out. How the challenge ended is very illustrative of how most careers end, however. For every superstar, there are hundreds and thousands of people who don’t make it, either through injury or giving up.

He tried several times to get back to practice, but when he was feeling better after some weeks of rest, it would only take him a few holes of golf to feel the pain in the back again. He had to give up on his dream.

Failure?

Although he didn’t reach the PGA-tour, I still think the project was fairly successful. Achieving such a high goal was never going to be easy, and it would have been difficult even if he stayed injury-free. Even though you put in 10 000 hours of deliberate practice, there’s no guarantee that you’ll make it. Especially when those you’re competing against are putting in the same amount of time and effort. Most of his competitors would also have started when they were a lot younger, having the advantage of better athleticism.

A career or dream ending with an injury is very common. But we often don’t hear those stories. For everyone who makes it to the top, there are hundreds and thousands that for some reason, couldn’t keep going.

Dealing with failure was difficult for Dan, as he had put so much time and effort into this project. After he got injured, it went almost two years before he wrote his next blog post. But ultimately, he had no regrets. It’s much better to have tried and failed than never having tried at all. Some things are out of your control, such as getting an injury that prevents you from practising. Dan has achieved one of his main goals, which was to inspire others to start similar projects and to believe that anything is possible if you put in the effort.

Take home message

If you want to be something, just start doing it. Whether it’s a culinary challenge, a musical challenge or an active challenge. You may not become the world expert, but you can reach a level where you truly enjoy it.

If you put a lot of effort into improving something, you will see a massive amount of effort.

Even if you fail to reach your original goal, you’ve achieved more than those who never try at all.

Read more about his experience at thedanplan.com

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