What Is The New Dan Plan?

The New Dan Plan: A 10,000-Hour Golf Experiment

October 29, 2026 | The New Dan Plan

In 2010, a guy named Dan McLaughlin quit his job to find out whether 10,000 hours of deliberate practice could turn an ordinary person into a professional golfer.

He had almost no experience playing golf. He wasn't a former college athlete or a junior golf prodigy. He was just a regular guy who became fascinated by a question: How much of what we call talent is actually the result of hard work?

He called his experiment The Dan Plan.

Over the next several years, he documented his progress on a website called thedanplan.com. He wrote about his practice, the things he was learning, the challenges he faced, and the people he met along the way.

His story eventually traveled around the world.

But in 2015, after roughly 6,000 hours, the experiment came to an end.

Dan never reached the 10,000-hour mark. And he never became a professional golfer.

For years, that's where the story ended.

Until now.

My name is Dan, too.

I'm Daniel Baghdasarian. I'm 35 years old, married, and a father of four. I work full-time in marketing, run a creative production company called Big Dreams Media, and live in Southern California.

And on April 28, 2025, I started my own 10,000-hour golf experiment.

I call it The New Dan Plan.

I didn't quit my job. I didn't sell everything I owned. I didn't move somewhere with perfect weather and unlimited access to golf. Because I already lived there.

I have a wife, four kids, a mortgage, a career, and all the responsibilities that come with those things. I'm not starting with a blank calendar. I'm starting with the life I already have.

And I want to find out whether someone in my position can still do something extraordinary, show my kids what it takes to chase your dreams, and believe that my faith and my grit can take me there.

Specifically, when it comes to answering the question...can I become a professional golfer?

That's the whole reason I'm doing this.

Why golf? Why 10,000 hours?

I've spent most of my professional life working in finance, marketing, and film production. For the last several years, I've helped tell other people's stories.

I've worked with some incredibly talented people, been part of an Emmy-winning team, and built a career around the idea that a good story is worth telling.

But somewhere along the way, I became interested in the question of what a person is actually capable of accomplishing when they fully commit to something.

Not for 30 days.

Not for a summer.

For years.

I've always loved sports. I've always been competitive. But I wasn't an accomplished golfer.

When I began this experiment, I was playing to roughly a 27 handicap and couldn't consistently break 100.

I wasn't particularly good.

And that's what made golf interesting.

It's a game where the results are measurable. You have a handicap. You have tournament scores. You have statistics. You can track how much you practice and compare where you started to where you end up.

The 10,000-hour idea is often misunderstood. There's no guarantee that putting in 10,000 hours makes someone an expert, let alone a professional athlete. Deliberate practice is more complicated than simply showing up and hitting balls.

But that's part of what I want to explore.

What happens if I take the process seriously? If I work with good coaches, practice with intention, compete regularly, and document the results?

How far can I actually go?

Meeting the original Dan

On November 15, 2025, I traveled to Oregon to meet Dan McLaughlin.

By then, I'd already spent several hundred hours working on my own experiment.

I wanted to meet the person who had inspired it.

We spent time together at Stone Creek Golf Club, talking about his journey, what he learned, and what it was like to pursue something so ambitious in public.

It's one thing to read about somebody's experience. It's another to sit across from that person and hear what it actually cost them.

Dan had committed years of his life to answering this question. He had made real sacrifices. He had also inspired a lot of people, myself included.

And while his experiment ended before he reached 10,000 hours, I don't think that makes it a failure.

He took a question most people would only talk about and actually tried to answer it.

That's worth something.

Meeting him meant a lot to me. It felt like being handed the opportunity to continue a story that had been left unfinished.

I'm not Dan McLaughlin. Our lives are different, and our experiments won't be identical.

But the question is the same.

And I hope I can do justice to what he started.

So where am I now?

I'm writing this first entry on October 29, 2026.

It's been about a year and a half since I started, and I've now invested approximately 1,200 hours into The New Dan Plan.

That's about 12% of the way to 10,000.

A lot has happened in those hours.

I started as a golfer who struggled to break 100. I've since broken 80 multiple times, with a personal best of 79. My handicap has been as low as 9.6.

I've spent the past year working nearly every week with my coach, Lee Breckenridge, trying to build a golf swing that can hold up under pressure.

I've also started playing competitive golf.

This year, I competed on the US Am Tour, earned Los Angeles Player of the Year honors in my flight, qualified for the National Championships at Sunriver Resort in Oregon, and finished fifth out of 40 players in the Palmer flight.

For someone who couldn't consistently break 100 when this started, those are pretty meaningful milestones.

But here's the thing.

I'm still a long way from being a professional golfer.

A very long way.

And the more I improve, the more I realize just how good the really good players are.

I've learned that there's an enormous difference between being able to shoot 79 on a good day and being able to shoot under par when it matters.

I've learned that a golf swing can feel incredible on the driving range and disappear the moment somebody hands you a scorecard.

I've learned that progress isn't linear. Some weeks I feel like I'm getting closer. Other weeks I wonder what I've been doing with all these hours.

And I've learned that practicing golf for 15 hours a week while raising four children and working full-time is a pretty serious undertaking.

There have been plenty of difficult days.

There have also been some of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

This is about more than becoming a professional golfer.

I want to be careful with that statement, because becoming a professional golfer is absolutely the goal.

I'm not putting in thousands of hours just to see whether I can get a little better at golf.

I want to find out how far I can go. I want to compete at the highest level I'm capable of reaching. I want to give myself a legitimate opportunity to pursue professional golf.

But I also know that the outcome isn't entirely within my control.

I can control whether I show up. I can control how I practice, who I learn from, and how seriously I take the process.

I can't control whether those things eventually make me good enough.

And somewhere in all of this is a bigger question about commitment, discipline, family, faith, and what it means to pursue something difficult without knowing how it will turn out.

I've grown a lot over the last year and a half.

Not just as a golfer.

I've had to learn how to manage my time differently, set boundaries, and become more intentional about the things that matter to me.

My faith has become a bigger part of that process, too. I don't believe any accomplishment in golf will mean very much if I lose sight of my relationship with Christ or the people I love along the way.

That's something I'm still working through.

I'm proud of what I've accomplished so far. But I'm also trying to make sure I don't get so consumed with reaching the destination that I miss the life happening around me.

I want to get better at golf.

I also want to be a better husband, father, and person when this is all over.

Why bring back the blog?

When Dan McLaughlin started the original Dan Plan, blogs were still a place where people documented their lives and ideas in real time.

You could follow along from the beginning, read about the good days and the bad ones, and see how somebody's thinking changed over time.

I miss that.

Today, almost everything is built around short videos, algorithms, and trying to get somebody's attention in the first three seconds.

I understand that world. I work in it.

And I'll continue making videos about this journey because I love storytelling and believe there's a lot worth documenting.

But I don't want The New Dan Plan to exist only as a collection of social media posts.

I want there to be a place where the entire experiment lives.

Somewhere I can write about a tournament without trying to squeeze the experience into a 60-second video.

Somewhere I can explain what I'm working on with my coach, share my actual scores, talk about the mistakes I'm making, and look back at what I believed 500 or 1,000 hours earlier.

I want people to be able to follow the journey from the beginning.

And I want to be able to look back on it myself.

So, in a small way, this is also a tribute to the original Dan Plan.

We're going back to the blog.

What you'll find here

I'm going to use this Journal to document the experiment as honestly as I can.

I'll write about practice, coaching, equipment changes, tournaments, my handicap, and the things I'm learning along the way.

I'll share the numbers.

I'll write about the rounds I'm proud of and the ones I'd rather forget.

I'll talk about what works, what doesn't, and how my approach changes as I get further into the experiment.

I'll also keep a running tracker of my hours and competitive results so anyone following along can see the progress for themselves.

I'm not going to pretend every week is a breakthrough.

Some weeks might just be a lot of work without much to show for it.

That's part of the story, too.

1,200 down. 8,800 to go.

This Sunday, November 1, I'll begin my second season on the US Am Tour at Tustin Ranch.

My goal this season is to earn another flight promotion and continue working toward becoming a scratch golfer.

Beyond that, I want to test myself against better and better competition.

I have some ambitious goals for 2027, including attempting to qualify for the U.S. Amateur.

Whether I'm ready for that remains to be seen.

But that's what makes this interesting.

I don't know where I'll be at 2,000 hours.

I certainly don't know where I'll be at 5,000.

And I have absolutely no idea what kind of golfer I'll be when I reach 10,000.

Maybe I'll make it.

Maybe I'll discover that the gap between a good amateur and a professional is simply too large.

Maybe I'll learn something nobody expected.

Whatever happens, I intend to keep showing up, keep learning, and keep documenting it.

Fifteen years ago, another Dan set out to answer a question and inspired people around the world to think differently about what might be possible.

He made it to 6,000 hours.

I'm at 1,200.

And I have a long way to go.

Welcome to The New Dan Plan.

Dan Baghdasarian