At what point is the challenge of Dan McLaughlin. Never having played 18 holes of golf, in April 2010, McLaughlin quit his job as a commercial photographer to pursue a goal of becoming a top professional golfer through 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. During the first 18 months, improvement was slow as McLaughlin first practiced his putting, chipping, and his drive. Then, as he began to put the various pieces together, improvement accelerated, consistent with hyper-growth behavior. While he didn’t track how quickly his handicap decreased, 28 months into the project, he has surpassed 91% of the 26 million golfers who register a handicap with the US Golf Association database. Not surprisingly, his rate of improvement (if measured as handicap) is now slowing as he faces competition from the top 10% amateur golfers (5,8 handicap). After three years of practice McLaughlin is in the middle of his journey, he played for about 5.500 hours and he has the same time to satisfy the 10.000 rule of deliberate practice needed to reach the excellence for the psychologist Anders Ericcson. His goal is to become in this time a professional golfer. This Laughling choice is very interesting and till now unique in sport, because it is the first time that a single individual, with no previous sport experiences as athlete, not young but adult, tries to show that the excellence can be achieved only through the persistent commitment of deliberate practiced
