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After he wins his first PGA tournament, McLaughlin plans to find another 10,000-hour project Chris Mueller
It’s unclear if Dan McLaughlin will ever be a great golfer, but he is very, very good at self-promotion. He got Nike to sponsor him as a golfer even though he had never hit a golf ball or watched a golf tournament on television. McLaughlin decided to become a professional after reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which examines K. Anders Ericsson’s study that says it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master any skill. So, right after turning 30 last year, he quit his job as a photographer for a marketing company, built a website, hired a coach, and decided to live off the $100,000 he had saved. He’s now on the “Dan Plan,” which involves golfing for 10,000 hours—which will take six and a half years of full-time commitment—with the goal of becoming one of the roughly 250 men on the PGA Tour out of the more than 60 million golfers in the world.
In July, McLaughlin passed his 1,700th hour. His instructor, Christopher Smith (ironically, the speed golf champion of the world), decided McLaughlin would start at the hole and work his way out. Slowly. So McLaughlin spent the first three weeks doing nothing but putting from three feet away. Smith wouldn’t let him progress to bigger clubs until he’d mastered the small ones. He had only four clubs in his bag—he was stuck on mastering the eight-iron. When he told people at parties that he was a full-time nonprofessional golfer, and they didn’t walk away, they often asked his handicap: “I say, ‘Oh, I don’t have one. I’ve been practicing for 15 months, but I’ve never played a game.’ People assume a slight bit of insanity.”
It takes a lot to be suspected of insanity in Portland, Ore. Portland seems like a dumb place to learn to golf, since it rains most of the year. But it’s a great place to treat your life like you’re the star of your own quirky indie movie. When McLaughlin explains the Dan Plan, “people don’t bat an eye,” he says. “And because I picked golf, it deters some people from being interested. If I decided to cook vegan hot dogs on a double-decker unicycle while home-brewing beer with pedal power, there would have been a lot more excitement.” Yes, he has already contacted the producers of Portlandia, a comedy series on the Independent Film Channel that makes fun of how earnest and twee Portland is. He’ll appear in an episode next season.
McLaughlin was able to save $100,000 on a pretty average salary—and buy a house—because he is clearly more than 10,000 hours into thriftiness. Sure, he’s done well in the stock market, buying Apple shares at $17, and he’s filled his house with roommates to pay the mortgage. But mostly, McLaughlin just doesn’t spend. He’s never paid for a single golf item, either getting stuff from Nike or finding equipment on the ground at courses. In fact, almost everything in his house was found. “He doesn’t buy food,” says his neighbor Chris Onstad over a lunch that McLaughlin wasn’t paying for.
“I do,” McLaughlin objects.
“Bagels,” Onstad says.
McLaughlin’s plan is to get his PGA card by joining a local mini-tour and going to Q-School, where thousands of amateurs compete for a tiny number of PGA spots. After he wins his first PGA tournament, he plans on quitting and mastering something else for another 10,000 hours. He hopes to become an inspirational story, told through a documentary he has been shooting footage for.
Although he may yet be the first to succeed in his mission, he’s not the first to try. Just a few years ago, a guy named Jon Fitzgerald decided at age 40 to put 10,000 hours into his golf game and made a documentary about it, The Back Nine. He lasted three months. So when McLaughlin called Ericsson at Florida State University, where he teaches psychology, the creator of the 10,000-hour rule figured McLaughlin would also quit soon after starting. “Nobody has done it, which means nobody knows how it’s going to wind up. He’s like Columbus,” Ericsson says. Sure, Ericsson has inspired memory champions, such as Joshua Foer, who wrote about it in Moonwalking with Einstein, but the competition wasn’t nearly as tough as golf: There aren’t 80 million people spending their weekends playing memory games. Ericsson believes that only deliberate practice—intensely focused time spent trying to improve—causes progress. “Most people on a job spend 10,000 hours and they are at the level they started out,” he says. “You can count the hours people drive and you’re not going to see a high correlation to skill. You have to try to stretch yourself and attain higher levels of control.”
