When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Author:Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner [Levitt, Steven D. & Dubner, Stephen J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Science, Economics
ISBN: 9780062385321
Amazon: 0062385321
Barnesnoble: 0062385321
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2015-05-04T23:00:00+00:00

10,000 Hours Later: The PGA Tour?

(SDL)

Last spring, I jokingly (okay, maybe half jokingly) wrote about my quest to make the Champions Tour, the professional golf tour for people over the age of fifty. In that post, I made reference to the ideas of Anders Ericsson, who argues that with ten thousand hours of the right kind of deliberate practice, more or less anyone can become more or less world class at anything. I’ve spent five thousand hours practicing golf, so if I could just find the time for five thousand more, I should be able to compete with the pros. Or at least that is what the theory says. My scorecards seem to be telling a different story!

It turns out I’ve got a kindred spirit in this pursuit, only this guy is dead serious. A few years back, twenty-something Dan McLaughlin decided he wanted to play on the PGA Tour. Never mind that he had only played golf once or twice in his life and had done quite poorly those times. He knew the 10,000-hour argument, and he thought it would be fun to give it a test. So he quit his job, found a golf coach, and has devoted his life to golf ever since. So far he is 2,500 hours into his 10,000-hour quest, which he chronicles at thedanplan.com.*

A while back I happened to find myself at Bandon Dunes, the golfers’ haven on the Oregon coast. I met Dan there, and we had the chance to play thirty-six holes together. We had a great time, and it was fascinating to get to know him and hear about his approach.

The golf pro who has been guiding him had a very unusual plan, to say the least. For the first six months of Dan’s golfing life, he was only allowed to putt. We are literally talking about Dan standing on a putting green for six to eight hours a day, six or seven days a week, hitting one putt after another. That is nearly one thousand hours of putting before he ever touched another club. Then he was given a wedge. He used just the wedge and the putter for another few months, before he got an eight iron. It wasn’t until a year and a half into his golfing life—two thousand hours of practice—that he hit a driver for the first time.

I understand the basic logic of starting close to the hole (most shots in golf, after all, do occur close to the hole), but to my economist’s mind, this sounds like a very bad strategy for at least two reasons.

First, one of the most basic tenets of economics is what we call diminishing marginal returns. The first little bit of something yields big returns; the more you do of something, the less valuable it is. For example, the first ice cream cone is delicious. The fourth is nauseating. The same must be true of putting. The first half hour is fun and engaging. By the eighth straight hour, it must be mind-numbing.

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