The Dan Plan - 10,000 Hours to Become a Pro Golfer (Dan McLaughlin)

[mchepp]

1 hour ago, bones75 said:

Additionally.. and tangentially related.  I'd imagine he's pretty down and out and discouraged. Regardless of what he puts out there to the media, he knows he's hit a major (and possibly danplan ending) roadblock.  He probably feels like he let some people down, let himself down, and doesn't see much hope in achieving his goals.  I think it would be nice if TST was a place he could look to for encouragement.

Guidance/criticism/constructive criticism/hate are all adjectives you can use regarding the same statement.  but there's obviously a difference, and there's more of one type of than others from the parts of this thread that I've read.

I hope he gets back out there, learns soemthing (from TST or elsewhere) and finishes what he started!

I interviewed him here

https://thesandtrap.com/b/throwing_darts/an_interview_with_the_dan_plan

So, he knows very well about TST, but he chose long ago to ignore anything he reads on the internet. So he won't come to a place like this for inspiration. @iacas offered him the best deal and he never took him up on it. I kinda knew he wouldn't but for me once he ignored that opportunity I knew it was over. 

I will also add, like you, the marketing aspect never bothered me. I have been mostly frustrated with the approach he has taken. Lot of posts in this saying this so I won't drone on. 

[Lihu]

1 hour ago, bones75 said:

Additionally.. and tangentially related.  I'd imagine he's pretty down and out and discouraged. Regardless of what he puts out there to the media, he knows he's hit a major (and possibly danplan ending) roadblock.  He probably feels like he let some people down, let himself down, and doesn't see much hope in achieving his goals.  I think it would be nice if TST was a place he could look to for encouragement.

Guidance/criticism/constructive criticism/hate are all adjectives you can use regarding the same statement.  but there's obviously a difference, and there's more of one type of than others from the parts of this thread that I've read.

I hope he gets back out there, learns soemthing (from TST or elsewhere) and finishes what he started!

 

He's got the swing speed and the accuracy, it would be interesting to see how far he gets with the remaining 4000 hours.

I wonder how much money it will cost for him to do that? It's only about 2 years working at it like a 9-5 type job.

[Pretzel]

6 hours ago, natureboy said:

Then you'd expect some settling around a mean. IMO the magnitude and length of the regression is an indication something important changed. Are your dates mapped accurately on that graph?

Interestingly enough, if you look at the blue line of that graph you will see that the average appears to be almost exactly flat beyond spring 2013 (maybe a slight decrease followed by an equally slight increase). This would actually be a good indication of a plateau. If he was manipulating his handicap in some way we know that his 10-round moving average would fluxuate as he posted better rounds before handicap revisions, while still remaining pretty much level if all he did was just enough to keep his handicap barely going down while his true ability remained flat.

Think about it: You only need 10 of your last 20 to be decent. If your "true" scores are 5-10 strokes higher than the other scores you enter to keep your handicap down it won't affect your handicap at all, but it will keep your 10-round average up since that average doesn't discard your bad scores. Thus you'd see an increase in the 10-round average when you put in "real" scores, and a sharp decrease once you start putting in the scores that are necessary to maintain your handicap. 

This is entirely a wild guess to attempt to explain data (in terms of why it would look this way). I think he did hit a plateau there just because his 10-round moving average stagnated, but for all I know it could be nothing. I know I have ups and downs in golf. Last Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I went out and shot -1 on the same course each day. Then I played twice this weekend and 27 holes today for a total of +20 since Saturday, which is uncharacteristically bad compared to how I played just a week earlier. It's the way golf is. That's why it's hard to assess Dan's real progress because it's very, very hard to distinguish between "it's just golf" and any sort of deliberate manipulation.

[RandallT]

13 hours ago, mchepp said:

I will also add, like you, the marketing aspect never bothered me.

Yah, I think I'm there too, even though I likely come across grumpy. I swear I'm not. I think my posts here everywhere on TST, not just this topic, speak for themselves. (this isn't a response to you, @mchepp, but a little bit to @bones75 who sensed that the overall tone here was negative).

I plotted this stuff way back when mostly in the hopes that he was trending in decent fashion (but interested to see what the data truly showed, not to fudge it at all). 

I think we've hashed this out on the thread many times, but if he just said he was going to focus on getting the best he could, devote his full energies to documenting exactly what he was doing, exactly what his scores were (leaving off the whole goal and necessary marketing), then I'd say the project was a success. A bit boring, with nobody linking to it being a motivational and inspirational story... and we'd have never heard about it. Such is life.

But he would've fulfilled that, and we'd see that a guy with zero experience could get to low single digits. That's pretty good info, in my mind. He could've documented his true learning process better, and it could've actually been more useful in the long run.

But when someone sets a public goal, then reach out for financial resources to fulfill the goal, it gets tough to be objective since so much is invested in the success. @bones75 even said that he likely feels that he's let people down. Once you get into that territory, it's human nature to start to frame what you're doing in a more positive light. That's just natural, and  I feel bad for him.

Perhaps he can salvage something positive in the arena of human potential, motivational speaking, life coaching, whatever. That was always where his true passion was- not golf itself (although he has the golf bug now). Good luck to him, as that area seems to be a glut too. Do we need more people doing this sort of thing? 

 

7 hours ago, Pretzel said:

Think about it: You only need 10 of your last 20 to be decent. If your "true" scores are 5-10 strokes higher than the other scores you enter to keep your handicap down it won't affect your handicap at all, but it will keep your 10-round average up since that average doesn't discard your bad scores. Thus you'd see an increase in the 10-round average when you put in "real" scores, and a sharp decrease once you start putting in the scores that are necessary to maintain your handicap. 

Curious if you keep all your scores going back years. If you had kept a running 10-round average, would there have been as much fluctuation in it (blue line)? Keep in mind, his scores are just raw numbers- no course difficulty/slope ratings. Just the number he mentions in his daily account.

There are a couple big spikes in that blue line where the 10-round average went up over 5 strokes and then back down again- over the course of just a few months. That's not one bad round, that's 10 rounds adding up to 50 strokes different than another set of 10 rounds. So that's a somewhat significant slump in scoring during the top of those spikes.

Part of the reason the blue line spikes may not have had much impact on his handicap is the season. I know one of the spikes looks like it was early 2013, before that season when GHIN tracks. But one of the spikes looks like it was in the summer, and the handicap only spiked 1 or 2 strokes. Could just be the math of it all, like you said, by dropping off the 10 worst.

So I never thought to investigate if that was fishy or manipulative or anything, but I've always wondered how those spikes compared to other low handicappers. It seems like more fluctuation than I'd expect. Does a guy who shoots mid 70s have a period of 10 rounds where he averages in low 80s, and then shoot right back down? Possibly. 

[nevets88]

14 hours ago, bones75 said:

Additionally.. and tangentially related.  I'd imagine he's pretty down and out and discouraged. Regardless of what he puts out there to the media, he knows he's hit a major (and possibly danplan ending) roadblock.  He probably feels like he let some people down, let himself down, and doesn't see much hope in achieving his goals.  I think it would be nice if TST was a place he could look to for encouragement.

Guidance/criticism/constructive criticism/hate are all adjectives you can use regarding the same statement.  but there's obviously a difference, and there's more of one type of than others from the parts of this thread that I've read.

I hope he gets back out there, learns soemthing (from TST or elsewhere) and finishes what he started!

You want negativity, see his thread in golfwrx. We're pretty reasonable and measured here comparatively.

David Feherty said directly to him you have no chance in hell or something to that effect.

If you put yourself out there, given today's social media environment, it's unreasonable not to expect a fair share of criticism.

[RandallT]

Taking this back to the philosophical, here's an updated podcast (April 2016) on the whole topic of How to Get Great at Just about Anything, with appearances from K Anders Ericsson, Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Levitt, etc:

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/peak/

It's long. Some snippets below. My notes in bold, or underlined. Overall, it's a long podcast, and still fairly vague. For all their promises of bringing such a scientific approach to the topic, my sense is that a lot of their conclusions seem like they are derived from anecdotes or just thinking about things. Seems mostly opinion, and not any real scientific insight to me.

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DUBNER: So the very popularized version of one big piece of your research gets a lot of things wrong, according to you. How much does that bother you? [MY NOTE: This is referring to Gladwell's Outliers]

ERICSSON: Well, the one thing that I’m mostly concerned about is, and I’ve met a lot people who are counting hours that they’re doing something and then assuming here that accumulating enough hours will eventually make them experts. Because I think that is a fundamental, incorrect view that is so different from what we’re proposing — namely, that you intentionally have to increase your performance, and you have to be guided, ideally by a teacher, that would allow you now to incrementally improve. So that idea that people actually think that they’re going to get better when they’re not — that, I find, to be the most troubling.

DUBNER:Have you talked with Malcolm about what you feel he got wrong?

ERICSSON: Have not ever spoken to Malcolm Gladwell. And I think that could have avoided some of his summaries of that work in Outliers, but I never interacted with him.

DUBNER: All right, so if I run into him anytime soon, would you like me to pass along a message of some kind?

ERICSSON: I’m really impressed with his books, and I think that they’ve caught a large audience. And if we were able now to channel that interest in improving yourself by now suggesting how you really need to invest the time to improve your performance — I think that would be terrific. If he doesn’t agree with our analysis here, I think it would be important that he explains why he views that basically it’s not so important exactly what you do, but it’s more important with the hours.

 

Quote

DUBNER: So there’s a sentence in, I believe, it’s in the chapter called “The 10,000-Hour Rule” in Outliers where you write that “10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness.” I understand that was one sentence within many paragraphs within many chapters that’s trying to prove your larger point, and yet, I’ve heard from a lot of people— and I’m guessing for every one I’ve heard from, you’ve heard 50 — who’ve embarked on these trajectories, where “I want to be a ballerina, a golfer, a whatever, whatever, whatever, and if I can get to 10,000 hours, that will make me great.” So that seems to be a causal relationship. How do you feel about people drawing that conclusion and taking action on it?

GLADWELL: Well, elsewhere in that same chapter, there is a very explicit moment where I say that you also have to have talent. That, what we’re talking about with 10,000 hours is: how long does it take to bring talent to fruition? To take some baseline level of ability and allow it to properly express itself and flourish. Ten thousand hours is meaningless in the absence of that baseline level of ability. I could play music for 20,000 hours. I am not becoming Mozart — never, ever, ever. I can play chess for 50,000 hours, and I am not becoming a grandmaster —ever, ever, ever.

DUBNER: You wrote about the Beatles and how one of the key reasons why they became the Beatles was because of the huge amount of time they spent in Hamburg and playing in clubs. This is distilled best by one sentence in Outliers on page 50: “The Hamburg crucible is one of the things that set the Beatles apart.” So Anders, in his book, Peak, and in the interview, took exception with the Beatles example and I’d be curious to run this scenario past you. So he said, I’ll just quote Anders a bit: “So to us” — he and his fellow researchers – “the Beatles, and I think a lot of people would agree, what made them outstanding was their composing of a new type of music. It wasn’t like they excelled at being exceptional instrumentalists. So if we want to explain here their ability to compose this really important music, deliberate practice should now be linked to activities that allow them to basically improve their compositional skills and basically get new feedback on their composition. So counting up the number of hours they perform together wouldn’t really enhance the ability here to write really innovative music.”

GLADWELL: Oh, I disagree — again, respectfully. I’m understanding I’m disagreeing with someone who knows more about this than me. My sense is that, as someone who is in — here I am about to commit a kind of casual obscenity, but — as someone who is also in the creative business, I think that playing in loud, crowded strip bars for hours on end, starting out with other people’s music covers, and moving slowing to your own music, is an extraordinary way to learn about composition. I know of my own writing, I began as a writer trying to write like William F. Buckley, my childhood hero. And if you read my early writing, it was insanely derivative. All I was doing was looking for models and copying them. Out of years of doing that, emerges my own style. So I would say, to the contrary. When you absorb on a deep level the lessons of your musical elders and betters, in many cases, that’s what makes the next step, the next creative step, possible. I would have a very different interpretation of where creativity comes from than he does. And the other thing I would point out is the Beatles literature predates Ericsson. So, he’s not the first to make arguments about practice. This literature goes back to the ‘60s and ‘70s. So a lot of what I was reading when I was writing that chapter was not Ericsson; it was rather a generation of people in this field that came before him. And they had point out, I think, very, very accurately, that the Beatles experience is really unusual. So people always say, “Well, lots of bands in Liverpool played a lot together.” Actually, they had played together 1,200 times — played live 1,200 times by the time they came to America in 1964. Twelve hundred live performances is a, I’m sorry, absolutely staggering number.

DUBNER: But the idea may be, presumably, that there could have been another group of four guys, even from Liverpool, who went to Hamburg and played for many, many hours — and played as many hours, but never got good. That’s the kind of hair that I think I’m trying to help you and Anders split.  Because I don’t hear as much disagreement as either of you hear, frankly. What I hear is that you’re more focused on the holistic creation of expertise, and he’s focused more on, I guess, what I would call the more technical version, which has to do with deliberate practice and what it is. And it sounds like he’s saying that 10,000 hours of something isn’t necessarily deliberate practice. And you’re saying 10,000 hours of practice isn’t necessarily deliberate practice, but there are things that happen in that process that you can’t get to without the 10,000 hours anyway.

GLADWELL: Yeah, and particularly when the four guys who are playing together 1,200 times under very, very trying circumstances are themselves insanely talented, right? So it’s not four schmoes — it’s, for goodness sake, it’s Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. (I’m not going to mention Ringo Starr.) Each one of whom individually could have had an extraordinary career as a rock-and-roll musician. We had three of them in the same room for years playing together. So there you have this kind of recipe for something extraordinary.

 

[natureboy]

14 hours ago, RandallT said:

Curious if you keep all your scores going back years. If you had kept a running 10-round average, would there have been as much fluctuation in it (blue line)? Keep in mind, his scores are just raw numbers- no course difficulty/slope ratings. Just the number he mentions in his daily account.

Sure average scores would fluctuate. Just consider the range of weather and course conditions across a whole year of golf even if you had no good days / bad days and felt 100% and your swing was absolutely locked in. Then consider that he does get injured, loses motivation / focus, loses his swing feels, and is also trying to make swing changes on the range and then test them on the course.

Quote

Part of the reason the blue line spikes may not have had much impact on his handicap is the season. I know one of the spikes looks like it was early 2013, before that season when GHIN tracks.

I don't know how long the GHIN goes dormant, but that's obviously a potential factor. From his GHIN, I'd say it's December to February. Notice that his GHIN stayed flat despite a run of low scores around January 2013 and high scores in winter 2013-2014.

Quote

But one of the spikes looks like it was in the summer, and the handicap only spiked 1 or 2 strokes. Could just be the math of it all, like you said, by dropping off the 10 worst.

A moving average is just that - average. HCP is about potential - not average - it has a strong bias to the low side. The best 10 of 20 effect is very, very important. Also, in the chart I included at the bottom you'll see with the blue 'hollow' data points based on a moving average of 10 scores that there are clusters with a lot of overlapping data points. That also matters, because if there is a low cluster with a lot of low scores followed by a spike upward with relatively few scores, the GHIN will be reluctant to move. There's a time lag and a weighting lag.

At least two of the upward spikes in raw scores are related to the summer tournament season, when I expect Dan is playing tougher courses than his regular 'home' courses, and putting more pressure on himself. Higher scores on tougher courses would affect his GHIN less dramatically than the same raw score on his home courses. And again the good scores earlier in the season can hang around a while. Then later in the season he accumulates more rounds on familiar, easier ground and his running average of raw scores drops again.

Also, did he post every round during the summer on his blog, or did he tend to post the tournament scores, because those were more significant events to mention than his regular GHIN training rounds on the home courses? If the raw score data you shared with me is from his blog and does not reflect every round posted for his GHIN then that's also a factor for divergence.

Quote

So I never thought to investigate if that was fishy or manipulative or anything, but I've always wondered how those spikes compared to other low handicappers. It seems like more fluctuation than I'd expect.

The chart I included below estimates a HCP based on average scores. An important caveat is that it uses the 'typical' variability of average relative to HCP differential (not to mention it does not account for actual course rating and slope for the posted score, just a rough average CR and Slope for Dan's home courses.

Not all players have average variability in scoring and Dan seems to embody the 'Wild Willy' pattern - particularly in tournaments - because he struggles with the driver.

It's interesting to me that his variability seemed to increase relative to the prior period in early 2013 when he states he made a major swing change because he was too 'out to in' and shifted to an 'in to out' pattern. This might not have been a good change for him, or he may not have understood enough about D-plane and the swing to make other adjustments to work with this more inside approach to get the relatively consistent scoring he seemed to have prior. Nevertheless he continued to make long-term improvement, though it slowed and he kept getting further and further from his goal guru targets.

IMO there is relatively good agreement between his posted scores and his GHIN. I don't see evidence for fudging. I do see evidence for his swing changes not really helping significantly and a generally poor performance in larger tournaments on tougher courses, because his 'Wild Willy' problems with driver is a big liability when playing away from his home courses.

22 hours ago, Pretzel said:

Interestingly enough, if you look at the blue line of that graph you will see that the average appears to be almost exactly flat beyond spring 2013 (maybe a slight decrease followed by an equally slight increase). This would actually be a good indication of a plateau.

I see a decline in rate of progress, but not a flat plateau. That's to be expected as most of the initial rapid progress is going to be in the first few years of full-time practice. But his inability to stay near the goal track is a pretty clear evidence that the PGA isn't going to happen. Maybe he could get close to scratch at the end of his 10K hours if he can figure out the driver?

Quote

If he was manipulating his handicap in some way we know that his 10-round moving average would fluxuate fluctuate as he posted better rounds before handicap revisions, while still remaining pretty much level if all he did was just enough to keep his handicap barely going down while his true ability remained flat.

See my comments to Randy above. Average is not HCP. Given all the reasonable explanations above for the 'apparent divergence' between his stated average scores and his GHIN, what would Occam's Razor say about the inference of manipulating his HCP? If he was was trying to pull a con, his average scores would hew close to the goal guru track.

Quote

I know I have ups and downs in golf. Last Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I went out and shot -1 on the same course each day. Then I played twice this weekend and 27 holes today for a total of +20 since Saturday, which is uncharacteristically bad compared to how I played just a week earlier. It's the way golf is.

I agree that's the way golf is.

Quote

That's why it's hard to assess Dan's real progress because it's very, very hard to distinguish between "it's just golf" and any sort of deliberate manipulation.

So what does Occam's Razor say the conclusion should be? I get your and others' annoyance at the lack of realism in his continued statement of making the PGA tour, but it does not follow from his Dan Plan marketing that he's cheating at golf / manipulating his HCP.

 

Edited May 12, 2016 by natureboy

[RandallT]

Great post @natureboy.

13 hours ago, natureboy said:

Also, did he post every round during the summer on his blog, or did he tend to post the tournament scores, because those were more significant events to mention than his regular GHIN training rounds on the home courses? If the raw score data you shared with me is from his blog and does not reflect every round posted for his GHIN then that's also a factor for divergence.

I'm not 100% sure if he posted every score in his narrative, but my daughter read off to me every date's entry, when she saw a round played (and a score), and I recorded it in my data set. http://thedanplan.com/countdown/ It was tedious, but we probably got it 95+% correct. I discarded 9-hole rounds, or any partial round. I didn't have her read out to me the full paragraph, so I didn't hear which were tournaments- just the fragment of the sentence that mentioned a score (I told her it would be something between 70 and 100).

Then for the GHIN, I would just find the round nearest to the date of GHIN publication date, and put in his GHIN. Ditto for the goal guru. The goals were expressed in total hours spent practicing and expected average score, and since each entry in the "countdown" mentioned how many hours left that he had, I could map that. I did some interpolation and put the score goal on the date of the nearest round to that many hours.  Close enough, but perhaps not exact.

On 5/11/2016 at 11:32 AM, RandallT said:

DUBNER: You wrote about the Beatles and how one of the key reasons why they became the Beatles was because of the huge amount of time they spent in Hamburg and playing in clubs. This is distilled best by one sentence in Outliers on page 50: “The Hamburg crucible is one of the things that set the Beatles apart.” So Anders, in his book, Peak, and in the interview, took exception with the Beatles example and I’d be curious to run this scenario past you. So he said, I’ll just quote Anders a bit: “So to us” — he and his fellow researchers – “the Beatles, and I think a lot of people would agree, what made them outstanding was their composing of a new type of music. It wasn’t like they excelled at being exceptional instrumentalists. So if we want to explain here their ability to compose this really important music, deliberate practice should now be linked to activities that allow them to basically improve their compositional skills and basically get new feedback on their composition. So counting up the number of hours they perform together wouldn’t really enhance the ability here to write really innovative music.”

GLADWELL: Oh, I disagree — again, respectfully. I’m understanding I’m disagreeing with someone who knows more about this than me. My sense is that, as someone who is in — here I am about to commit a kind of casual obscenity, but — as someone who is also in the creative business, I think that playing in loud, crowded strip bars for hours on end, starting out with other people’s music covers, and moving slowing to your own music, is an extraordinary way to learn about composition.

I thought this was interesting above. It gets to the idea of whether or not playing a round of golf should be considered "deliberate practice."  For those who read Outliers, Gladwell feels that playing cover songs in Hamburg was critical to the Beatles' growth and counted as deliberate practice. Ericsson disagrees.

Dan is considering a round played as some hours of deliberate practice (not the full time of the round, however), but my sense is that Ericsson thinks that deliberate practice is far more specific than that. Gladwell admits his approach is less academic, but certainly one would gain skill from just engaging deeply in the activity- whether or not you were practicing a specific skill.

Perhaps an esoteric point, but I found it interesting.

Also, I find it interesting that Gladwell never reached out to Ericsson. For a person who got so much recognition for taking Ericsson's ideas and running with them, perhaps a good discussion would've been appropriate to avoid misunderstanding or incorrect interpretation of the ideas. Now we're realizing that they have never even spoken, which surprises me a bit.

[nevets88]

4 hours ago, RandallT said:

Great post @natureboy.

I'm not 100% sure if he posted every score in his narrative, but my daughter read off to me every date's entry, when she saw a round played (and a score), and I recorded it in my data set. http://thedanplan.com/countdown/ It was tedious, but we probably got it 95+% correct. I discarded 9-hole rounds, or any partial round. I didn't have her read out to me the full paragraph, so I didn't hear which were tournaments- just the fragment of the sentence that mentioned a score (I told her it would be something between 70 and 100).

Then for the GHIN, I would just find the round nearest to the date of GHIN publication date, and put in his GHIN. Ditto for the goal guru. The goals were expressed in total hours spent practicing and expected average score, and since each entry in the "countdown" mentioned how many hours left that he had, I could map that. I did some interpolation and put the score goal on the date of the nearest round to that many hours.  Close enough, but perhaps not exact.

I thought this was interesting above. It gets to the idea of whether or not playing a round of golf should be considered "deliberate practice."  For those who read Outliers, Gladwell feels that playing cover songs in Hamburg was critical to the Beatles' growth and counted as deliberate practice. Ericsson disagrees.

Dan is considering a round played as some hours of deliberate practice, but my sense is that Ericsson thinks that deliberate practice is far more specific than that. Gladwell admits his approach is less academic, but certainly one would gain skill from just engaging deeply in the activity- whether or not you were practicing a specific skill.

Perhaps an esoteric point, but I found it interesting.

Also, I find it interesting that Gladwell never reached out to Ericsson. For a person who got so much recognition for taking Ericsson's ideas and running with them, perhaps a good discussion would've been appropriate to avoid misunderstanding or incorrect interpretation of the ideas. Now we're realizing that they have never even spoken, which surprises me a bit.

In some aspects, I can't really take Gladwell seriously. He's a heck of a writer. Whether the things he writes about really make sense when you think about them, not so much. I drank the kool aide for awhile, as I've gotten older and wiser, not drinking it any more. I'm guessing Ericsson probably thinks Gladwell is a bit of a pseudo-intellectual and maybe Ericsson isn't happy Gladwell co-opted his material and dumbed it down. For all the writing talking and thinking about the 10K hypothesis, what are the solid takeaways?

 

[DrvFrShow]

I disagree with Ericsson. Playing cover songs does count as deliberate practice. One learns the technique needed to play the songs. One learns the technique needed to make certain motions on the the neck of a guitar or other instrument. You see today's approach to music is highly technical. Back in the 1800s they didn't have a ton of technical exercises for students. What did students studying Beethoven play when they were preparing to learn Beethoven? They played Beethoven. If one was learning how to play a Mozart Sonata, one didn't spend hours and hours practicing technical exercises because they didn't exist. You practiced the Mozart Sonata. In doing so you learn the technique necessary to play the Sonata. I learned the technique necessary to play Baroque music by playing Bach Partitas. I didn't waste my time playing Dohnanyi technical exercises for hours.

Thus I think you can also count playing practice rounds on the golf course as deliberate practice. You may not necessarily be playing the round by the rules of golf. Say if you're working on playing slice lies, the golf course is about the only place you can do that. You might be moving your ball to one and hitting a couple balls from that lie on a hole. But you're learning how to hit the ball from that lie. Same from a hook lie. 

At the driving range all you have is flat lies, and mostly from mats. 

It's a learning process. One method is far more technical than the other, but you can't dismiss the less technical approach outright.

[RandallT]

30 minutes ago, DrvFrShow said:

You see today's approach to music is highly technical. Back in the 1800s they didn't have a ton of technical exercises for students. What did students studying Beethoven play when they were preparing to learn Beethoven? They played Beethoven. If one was learning how to play a Mozart Sonata, one didn't spend hours and hours practicing technical exercises because they didn't exist. You practiced the Mozart Sonata. In doing so you learn the technique necessary to play the Sonata. I learned the technique necessary to play Baroque music by playing Bach Partitas. I didn't waste my time playing Dohnanyi technical exercises for hours.

Julia, you might enjoy the full transcript or listen to much of the podcast, if you had the time:

 

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/peak/

Lots of talk about music in it. Mozart and piano stuff that I skipped through quickly. I might get back to it and listen fully sometime.

By the way, I agree with you re: rounds counting as deliberate practice.

[natureboy]

38 minutes ago, RandallT said:

Great post @natureboy.

I'm not 100% sure if he posted every score in his narrative, but my daughter read off to me every date's entry, when she saw a round played (and a score), and I recorded it in my data set. http://thedanplan.com/countdown/ It was tedious, but we probably got it 95+% correct. I discarded 9-hole rounds, or any partial round.

Thanks. I wasn't questioning your selection and entry of the data, just that I expect having read through the countdown posts myself that not all rounds played and entered for Dan's GHIN are represented in the countdown. For example, I notice less frequency of home course scores mentioned during the tournament season. He'll post scores when travelling to a new course, but when back home focus on what he's working on. I think this supports my view that the posted scores are a sample of the total universe of his scores and a likely source for divergence.

Quote

I thought this was interesting above. It gets to the idea of whether or not playing a round of golf should be considered "deliberate practice."  For those who read Outliers, Gladwell feels that playing cover songs in Hamburg was critical to the Beatles' growth and counted as deliberate practice. Ericsson disagrees.

I have to agree with Gladwell on the learning from emulation of a master craftsman's work. This was part of the old 'apprentice' system where you followed a 'mold' or 'pattern' and did routine tasks until technically mastered it and moved up to more advanced skills - eventually innovating and develop a personal style. A similar thing happens in kitchen work. To a certain extent the Beatles were on a self-apprenticeship in Hamburg, but they were all individually very music-savvy and likely replaced the advisory role of 'master' with each other. Plus it was a relatively new genre of music so expectations of virtuoso playing may have been relatively low (especially in the early years).

I've seen some grass-roots learning by ear music workshops where the student will express difficulty with a certain passage and the experienced player will offer some tips or an approach for working through it or building the skills to do it well (i.e. things to work on when they go home). This could be some of the 'deliberate practice' that Ericsson deals with. I expect a bit of both matter. I don't think you become a virtuosic soloist just by doing drills.

I'm not sure Dan has really had that level of regular savvy advice / feedback, and not sure he substituted for it by fully educating himself.

Edited May 12, 2016 by natureboy

[mchepp]

2 minutes ago, natureboy said:

I have to agree with Gladwell on the learning from emulation of a 'master crafstman'. This was part of the old 'apprentice' system where you did the same rote routine task until you mastered it and moved up to more advanced skills. A similar thing happens in kitchen work. To a certain extent the Beatles were on a self-apprenticeship in Hamburg, but they were all individually very music-savvy and likely replaced the advisory role of 'master' with each other. I'm not sure Dan has really had that level of regular savvy advice / feedback, and not sure he substituted for it by fully educating himself.

Your comment here has me thinking a little bit about mastery and Dan. Dan has a skill, he is a very talented photographer. He has an eye for it and some of the stuff he showed me was pretty impressive. But photography as a learned skill and how you perfect it is very different than an athletic endeavor like golf. I think he became a excellent photographer on his own, maybe he had some guidance, but I think this skill is something he learned through doing and not learning everyday next to an instructor. I would love to go back and ask him how he learned photography and if any of that learning has applied to golf. 

Maybe he thought that if he had become an expert at photography with some guidance from someone, but mostly he learned his skill on his own. He may have thought that he could just use the same strategy. 

Not sure, just me guessing.

[natureboy]

2 minutes ago, mchepp said:

Your comment here has me thinking a little bit about mastery and Dan. Dan has a skill, he is a very talented photographer. He has an eye for it and some of the stuff he showed me was pretty impressive. But photography as a learned skill and how you perfect it is very different than an athletic endeavor like golf. I think he became a excellent photographer on his own, maybe he had some guidance, but I think this skill is something he learned through doing and not learning everyday next to an instructor. I would love to go back and ask him how he learned photography and if any of that learning has applied to golf. 

Maybe he thought that if he had become an expert at photography with some guidance from someone, but mostly he learned his skill on his own. He may have thought that he could just use the same strategy. 

Not sure, just me guessing.

That would be an interesting question.

There may have been a lot of self-teaching in photography, but he likely had teachers, books, and eventually editors...just like Gladwell would have had in writing.

[Lihu]

3 hours ago, mchepp said:

Your comment here has me thinking a little bit about mastery and Dan. Dan has a skill, he is a very talented photographer. He has an eye for it and some of the stuff he showed me was pretty impressive. But photography as a learned skill and how you perfect it is very different than an athletic endeavor like golf. I think he became a excellent photographer on his own, maybe he had some guidance, but I think this skill is something he learned through doing and not learning everyday next to an instructor. I would love to go back and ask him how he learned photography and if any of that learning has applied to golf. 

Maybe he thought that if he had become an expert at photography with some guidance from someone, but mostly he learned his skill on his own. He may have thought that he could just use the same strategy. 

Not sure, just me guessing.

Do you think you can get another interview with him to ask? The fact that he is an expert in something reinforces my current feeling that he has very likely accomplished everything he stated in golf.

It would be interesting to hear what he thinks.

Really nice photograph that definitely takes some talent to produce, even though I think puttersexual behavior is definitely sinful behavior.

 

3 hours ago, natureboy said:

That would be an interesting question.

There may have been a lot of self-teaching in photography, but he likely had teachers, books, and eventually editors...just like Gladwell would have had in writing.

I agree, this would be interesting.

[Pretzel]

1 minute ago, Lihu said:

puttersexual behavior

So that's what it's called when I get screwed over by my putter during a round.

[nevets88]

I've said this before, I'll say it again. I commend him for taking the chance and putting himself out there, but overall, his endeavor to inspire, well mixed feelings. Golf-wise, to me, he just reenforced the notion of just how hard golf is. All those articles citing him as a "successful" or semi successful application of deliberate practice are a turn off, there is really no substance to them, just some vague ideas that sound good on paper.

[natureboy]

5 hours ago, natureboy said:

I don't think you become a virtuosic soloist just by doing drills.

But you do have to master a wide range of basic and special techniques so they are available to you for application to the final product.