There’s an excellent story in a recent edition of Tampa’s St. Petersburg Times, about Dan McLaughlin, a guy who’s decided to take up golf.

Or, rather, a guy who’s decided to really take up golf. Despite having never played before, he’s set his sights on a slot in the PGA tour. His plan is simple: practice golf for 10,000 hours over the next six years. (That’s six hours a day, six days a week, for those without a calculator.)

It’s a great, albeit clearly insane, experiment, that puts to test an academic theory popularized most recently by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: that becoming truly excellent at something requires less talent and natural skill, and more a willingness to put in about 10,000 hours of hard, focused work.

If that theory is right, by the end of six years, Dan should be one hell of a scratch golfer. If not, then perhaps some of the research on expertise is bound back to the drawing board, and Dan is clearly headed back to a real job.

Either way, I’m curious to see how this pans out, so I’ll be following along at his blog, www.thedanplan.com. But I’ll also be giving some real thought to where the 10,000 hours idea might apply to my own life.

Because, at some basic level, much as I’m impressed with Dan’s commitment and focus, I’m also pretty sure I wouldn’t want to spend six years of my life devoted to nothing other than being a better golfer.

What I’m less clear on is, what would I devote six years to? And, similarly, where have I already been chalking up serious practice hours?

There’s trumpet playing, for example, which I’ve been doing regularly since the age of nine, and where I’ve, by napkin calculation, amassed about half of the expert count, weighing in somewhere near 5,000 hours total.

But there, too, I’m not (and don’t want to be) a full-time professional trumpet player. I do consider myself a full-time entrepreneur, however. Though, on that front, I’m not sure my daily work really qualifies as hard, focused practicing of entrepreneurship. In the world of practice research, that would be ‘deliberate practice’, which roughly boils down to:

1. Focusing on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Setting specific goals.
3. Getting good, prompt feedback, and using it.

So I’ve been thinking about how I might make my work more deliberately practiceful. About what other areas of interest might warrant 10,000 hours of focus. And, finally, about how, as I’m certainly unwilling to put in 10,000 hours of practice on it, I’ll likely always be terrible at golf.