by Michael Kruse
Testing researchers’ theory that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice can lift an ordinary person to excellence, Dan McLaughlin practices chip shots at Mangrove Bay Golf Course in St. Petersburg. McLaughlin had never golfed before he conceived The Dan Plan: to put in 10,000 hours of practice and become good enough to play the game professionally.
One wet, raw day last April, at the Broadmoor public golf course in Portland, Ore., Dan McLaughlin stood in the center of one of the greens. He wore running shoes, blue jeans and a yellow rubber raincoat. He wrapped his frozen fingers around a two-buck putter and hit one-foot putts, and he did that for two hours straight, stopped for a cup of hot, decaffeinated tea, then did it for two hours more. That’s how this started.
On his 30th birthday, June 27, 2009, Dan had decided to quit his job to become a professional golfer.
He had almost no experience and even less interest in the sport.
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.”
The idea appealed to Dan. His 9-to-5 job as a commercial photographer had become unfulfilling. He didn’t want just to pay his bills. He wanted to make a change.
Could he stop being one thing and start being another? Could he, an average man, 5 feet 9 and 155 pounds, become a pro golfer, just by trying? Dan’s not doing an experiment. He is the experiment.
The Dan Plan will take six hours a day, six days a week, for six years. He is keeping diligent records of his practice and progress. People who study expertise say no one has done quite what Dan is doing right now.
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.”
Dan is the youngest son of a family of high achievers. One of his grandfathers was a career IBM man. The other was a civil engineer. His father is an actuary. So is his brother. Actuaries calculate risk. They make statistical predictions about the future based on past performance. His brother graduated with high honors as a math major from Georgia Tech and then did it again in the divinity program at Boston University and now lives and works in New York City and is married with a young daughter. His sister is a dermatologist in Atlanta and a mother of four. She regularly runs marathons.
Dan? He’s the only one of his siblings who wasn’t confirmed in the Methodist church in which they grew up. He didn’t understand why he had to do this just because everybody else was doing this. He was 12.
Within his immediate family, he said, “I’m definitely the one with the most wander in my heart.”
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