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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: 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.