McLaughlin quit his job at 30 to pursue a golf career and test a theory that practicing for 10,000 hours pays off.
When he turned 30 about four years ago, Dan McLaughlin, a commercial photographer living in Portland, Ore., decided to dream big. Or more like crazy. Today, he told himself, he might be photographing dental chairs, but someday he'd be playing the Masters Golf Tournament. No matter that he had barely swung a club in his life; he would quit his job and hit the links. "It was kind of an impulsive decision," he says. "At worst, I figured, it's like pre-emptive retirement. Since we'll all be working in our 90s anyway, might as well do the golf thing in your 30s."
Fast-forward to this February. On a bright morning in Encino, Calif., McLaughlin is hitting shots on a driving range. Nearby, UCLA psychology professor Robert Bjork, one of the world's most respected cognitive scientists, is beaming at McLaughlin as if he were a star student. McLaughlin has logged about 4,000 hours of practice time since his 30th-birthday epiphany and has lowered his handicap to about 7--which means he's better than almost 85% of the male American golfing public. Since April 2010, he has worked on his game six days a week, living off savings and some wise stock picks and by renting out the house he bought five years ago. "If you know me," he says self-deprecatingly, "you know I wear one pair of pants."
For scientists like Bjork, who heads UCLA's Learning and Forgetting Lab, McLaughlin is a lab rat in human form. He's testing the theory developed by Florida State University psychology professor Anders Ericsson and popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling book Outliers: The Story of Success that, on average, 10,000 hours of deliberate, efficient practice can produce international expertise in fields like chess, dance and swimming. Ericsson based his theory on the careers of professional musicians who tended to start their 10,000 hours before they could read. A 30-year-old starting from scratch was new to him. "I've never heard of anyone else committing to it like this," says Ericsson, who has advised McLaughlin. "It's like Dan is going into mental space, seeing what's possible."
McLaughlin knows he's a long shot. "I couldn't imagine a more frustrating pursuit," he says during a practice round with Bjork and Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychology professor and prominent memory expert. Bjork and Schacter beat McLaughlin. (They're both avid albeit older golfers: Bjork is 74, Schacter 60.) "Dan's progress is amazing," says Schacter. "But as you start pushing the extremes of the distribution curve," where the exceptional ones, the outliers, live, "it's so difficult to make that final step."
Whatever McLaughlin's odds, academics are watching him closely. In March at the annual Interdisciplinary Conference on Human Performance--a gathering of the country's top learning and memory researchers, held this year in St. George, Utah--the Dan Plan was a hot topic. "It has much grander implications than golf," says Mark Guadagnoli, a kinesiology professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.