Dan McLaughlin's 10,000-Hour Plan: Become a Pro Golfer

It’s unclear if Dan McLaughlin will ever be a great golfer, but he is very, very good at self-promotion. He got Nike to sponsor him as a golfer even though he had never hit a golf ball or watched a golf tournament on television. McLaughlin decided to become a professional after reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which examines K. Anders Ericsson’s study that says it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master any skill. So, right after turning 30 last year, he quit his job as a photographer for a marketing company, built a website, hired a coach, and decided to live off the $100,000 he had saved. He’s now on the “Dan Plan,” which involves golfing for 10,000 hours—which will take six and a half years of full-time commitment—with the goal of becoming one of the roughly 250 men on the PGA Tour out of the more than 60 million golfers in the world.

In July, McLaughlin passed his 1,700th hour. His instructor, Christopher Smith (ironically, the speed golf champion of the world), decided McLaughlin would start at the hole and work his way out. Slowly. So McLaughlin spent the first three weeks doing nothing but putting from three feet away. Smith wouldn’t let him progress to bigger clubs until he’d mastered the small ones. He had only four clubs in his bag—he was stuck on mastering the eight-iron. When he told people at parties that he was a full-time nonprofessional golfer, and they didn’t walk away, they often asked his handicap: “I say, ‘Oh, I don’t have one. I’ve been practicing for 15 months, but I’ve never played a game.’ People assume a slight bit of insanity.”