Mastering Expertise

In 2010 I got an email from a man named Dan McLaughlin from Portland, Oregon. He had read about my deliberate-practice research in various places, including Geoff Colvin’s book Talent Is Overrated, and he wanted to use it in his efforts to become a professional golfer. 

To understand just how audacious this was, you need to know a little about Dan. He had not played on his high school or college golf team. In fact, he’d never really played golf at all. He’d been to a driving range with friends a few times, but he’d never played a full eighteen-hole round of golf in his life. Indeed, at thirty years old, he had never been a competitive athlete of any sort.

But he had a plan, and he was serious about it: he would quit his job as a commercial photographer and spend the next six or so years learning to play golf. Having read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers and taken “the ten-thousand-hour rule” at face value, Dan figured he would put in ten thousand hours of deliberate practice and become a good enough player to join the Professional Golfers’ Association tour. To get on the tour, he’d have to first gain admission to the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament and then do well enough in that tournament to receive a PGA Tour card. This would allow him to compete in PGA tournaments.

A year and a half after starting his project, which he called “the Dan Plan,” he gave an interview to Golf magazine. When the writer asked him why he was doing it, Dan gave an answer I really liked. He said he didn’t appreciate the attitude that only certain people can succeed in certain areas—that only those people who are logical and “good at math” can go into mathematics, that only athletic people can go into sports, that only musically gifted people can become really good at playing an instrument. This sort of thinking just gave people an excuse not to pursue things that they might otherwise really enjoy and perhaps even be good at, and he didn’t want to fall into that trap. “That inspired me to try something completely different from anything I’d ever done,” he said. “I wanted to prove that anything’s possible if you’re willing to put in the time.”

Even more than this statement, I liked Dan’s realization that deliberate practice isn’t just for kids who are beginning a life of training to become chess grandmasters or Olympic athletes or world-class musicians. Nor is it just for members of large organizations, like the U.S. Navy, that can afford to develop some high-intensity training program. Deliberate practice is for everyone who dreams. It’s for anyone who wants to learn how to draw, to write computer code, to juggle, to play the saxophone, to pen “the Great American Novel.” It’s for everyone who wants to improve their poker game, their softball skills, their salesmanship, their singing. It’s for all those people who want to take control of their lives and create their own potential and not buy into the idea that this right here, right now, is as good as it gets.

This is an extract from Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool's Peak published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt