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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @03:46PM (1 child)
That competence has nothing to do with success (at least financial and status) and the inverse is often the case
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday August 14 2017, @05:15PM
I concur, I have often seen a dynamic of incompetence and confidence being leveraged in IT consulting (without the IT person being aware of possessing both due to being assurably stupid), and this increases any gained financial success in direct relation to employers who are incompetent and unconfident and are further unable to determine the difference between trained ability and and feigned capability.
Only when the stuff eventually breaks does the truth come out -- provided the same IT person that caused the preventable disaster isn't able to get the vendor to bail them out yet another time. (Sometimes it is hard for such people to fix the internet if they can't access the internet to find out what to do to fix what they broke on the network/firewall.)
Of course, outside consultants are usually crooks and criminals, you know--it's like the game Counterstrike, where the other team is always the bad guys. Either the consultants are stupid like the example above and are so undeservably well rewarded for it... or they are good at what they do, which gets them called names like being a crook or criminal by the example above, which leads to fun workplace challenges.