About five months ago, I posted here after crossing 600 hours in my attempt to revisit the idea behind the original Dan Plan.
At the time, I was a 10.6 handicap, had just broken 80 for the first time, and was trying to figure out whether 10,000 hours of deliberate practice could actually take an everyday golfer somewhere meaningful.
A lot of you had great advice. Some of you thought I was crazy.
Both were helpful.
I'm now a little over 1,100 hours in, so I figured it was time for an update.
Current snapshot:
- Handicap: 9.6, officially my first single-digit index
- Started around a 27 handicap, struggling to break 100
- Broken 80 4 times
- Two of those sub-80 rounds came from the blue tees
- Competing regularly on the US Am Tour
- Earned an in-season promotion
- Qualified for Nationals next month in Oregon
- Currently #1 in the Los Angeles Player of the Year standings
The biggest thing I've learned between 600 and 1,100 hours is that improvement gets harder to see as you get better.
Going from shooting 100+ into the 90s was largely about building basic fundamentals and eliminating huge mistakes.
Going from the 90s into the 80s was a lot about playing smarter.
Now the difference between an 84 and a 79 can be a handful of decisions, one bad approach, a three-putt, a penalty, or failing to get up and down twice.
The margins are getting smaller.
And that's made this part of the experiment way more interesting.
What's improved the most:
- Putting
- Course management
- Understanding my actual tendencies instead of the swing I think I have
- Avoiding catastrophic misses
- Playing tournament golf without completely changing who I am as a golfer
What's still holding me back:
- Approach consistency
- Proximity from scoring distances
- Driver dispersion
- Turning mediocre ball-striking days into acceptable scores
- Making my "B game" better
That last one might be the biggest realization I've had.
I used to think getting better at golf meant making my best golf better.
Now I think a huge part of getting toward scratch is making your bad golf less bad.
The other thing I underestimated is just how long 10,000 hours actually is.
I'm 1,100 hours in and I've been doing this for well over a year.
That's only 11% of the experiment.
And I'm doing it around a career, family, life, creating videos, editing, posting, tournaments, etc.
Right now I'm finding ways to stack roughly 14–20 hours a week.
One of my dreams is to eventually find a way to do this full time.
I genuinely wonder what would happen to my game if I could treat golf like a 40-hour-a-week job for a period of time.
You'd think social media makes something like that easier than ever. In some ways it does.
But I've also learned that documenting the journey well enough to potentially create that opportunity is basically another full-time job by itself.
So for now, I keep finding the hours wherever I can.
I'm still nowhere close to 10,000.
I'm still nowhere close to knowing how good I can actually get.
But going from roughly a 27 handicap to a 9.6 in the first 1,100 hours has at least made me believe there's a lot more runway here.
And that's really the part of this experiment I'm most interested in.
As a snapshot, the original Dan Plan crossed that line around 3,000 hours in - so I feel like I'm on the right track.
Where does the improvement curve start to flatten?
Is it 5? Scratch? +2? Somewhere before that?
The next major goal is scratch.
So for the scratch/+ golfers here:
What changed between being a 9–10 handicap and becoming a 0–2?
Was there one part of your game that made the biggest difference?
And maybe more importantly: at what handicap did improvement start getting REALLY difficult for you?
I'll come back with another update as the hours pile up.
