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from the he'll-never-make-it-to-Carnegie-Hall dept.
The Atlantic has an article on Dan McLaughlin, the "average guy" who spent six thousand hours working on becoming a professional golfer
Seven-plus years ago, aged 30 and unsure even of which hand to grip a golf club in, McLaughlin quit his job as a commercial photographer, took in lodgers to cover the mortgage, husbanded his savings for green fees, and set out to make the PGA Tour, home to the world's elite golfers.
He created a catchily named blog to document his quest, and in short order the Dan Plan commanded magazines spreads and TV spots. Along the way, it drew an avid community of followers riveted by the spectacle of a regular Joe living out an everyman fantasy. No less captivated: a salon of leading figures from the science of learning and human performance.
What could you achieve if you committed to something completely, all-in, no excuses? How far could you go? For five years, McLaughlin cast everything else aside—career, money, even relationships—to put this to the test. But then his back gave out. He pushed himself to the limit and still came up short.
The article follows Dan's attempt to follow the idea, popularised in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, that 10,000 hours of practice is the main factor in developing any skill to world class expertise.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday August 14 2017, @01:18PM (4 children)
As TFA says, this probably appeals to people, because we all have "roads not taken", things we think we might have, should have, could have tried - but didn't.
If we look at "Dan the golfer", odds are his talent is somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. He managed to get his handicap down to -2.7. Any decent professional golfer is in the range +3 to +6. That means that, to get a score competitive with a professional golfer, he should stop playing after the 16th hole. His 6000 hours of practice made him a competent amateur.
Talent counts. I can program rings around anyone who lacks the talent. OTOH, I like the piano, but 10,000 hours of practice might...barely...make me less painful to listen to. Meanwhile, a classmate of my son gave a piano recital - wow! Then the bombshell: She decided to start playing just a short year before. Natural talent.
In the progressive world, people want to think that everyone is exactly equal: equally good at math, at golf, at art, at whatever we put our minds to. We cannot admit that people have different abilities; that each of us is the result of a genetic dice roll. Above all - horror - we cannot observe that talents correlate with any visible attributes such as gender [runnersworld.com] or skin color [iaaf.org].
tl;dr: Reality doesn't care what we want. Different people have different talents, and talent influences both speed of learning and what you can achieve.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Monday August 14 2017, @01:58PM
How is "High T" women only a recent phenomenon? One would assume that if naturally high levels of testosterone were what made women win the 800m then 80%+ of all winners dating back to the start of the modern olympics would have this trait? For how long have we been capable of and actively testing for testosterone levels in athletes, and have all women in the past with +10 nmol/L been accused of doping?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @04:07PM
10000 hours is a huge time investment. If you play the piano for an hour every single day, that takes close to 30 years to reach 10000 hours. If you actually did that then you would almost certainly be able to perform at a high level.
The thing is that playing an instrument for an hour every day for 30 years takes an awful lot of dedication. When you are wondering "What should I do on this lovely day?" the answer has to almost always be "I think I shall play the piano." So there is a lot of self selection going on: the only people who will actually reach 10,000 hours of playing time are those who are maybe kind of good at the piano in the first place.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday August 14 2017, @06:41PM (1 child)
"All men are created equal" doesn't mean people have the same abilities and talents, in equal measure. It means all deserve fair and equal treatment, no discrimination for religious beliefs, skin color, gender, height, strength, or any other excuse that's been used to divide people into insiders and outsiders, and deny the outsiders.
Seems that distinction gets lost too easily. Throughout history, there's been a lot of self-serving propaganda proclaiming that the disadvantaged are actually inferior. Wars are particularly effective at tempting propagandists out of the woodwork. Today, there is a gender imbalance in engineering, and computer science is the worst of all. Why this imbalance exists is the question. It is extremely politically incorrect to suggest that maybe women just aren't as good at engineering, but that idea is very much alive. Could there be something to that notion, or is it yet another case of bias, conscious and unconscious? History strongly suggests the latter. Used to be only the nobility could read and write. Peasants supposedly didn't have the ability to learn that. Then, Africans supposedly couldn't read, write, or do more than very basic math, thus showing they were fit only to be slaves. Even more recent is of course the whole notion of the "master race". Throughout all that, women have been relegated to 2nd class status, for instance not being allowed to vote, and today in Afghanistan being kept ignorant by zealots who think women shouldn't be educated.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday August 14 2017, @08:22PM
> no discrimination for religious beliefs
- "Your honor, eating that child is an ancient tradition of my baal worship, we must perform..."
- "Case dismissed"
Account abandoned.