What Golf Has Taught Me About Life

I'm starting to really get into golf. It's different to a lot of sports because it's truly like an experiment. If you go to a driving range, every shot is exactly repeatable. Everything is set up in the same way. You're the only moving part: you don't need to take the bounce, spin, speed of the ball coming towards you into account and adjust your shot accordingly (like in tennis, the other sport I play quite a bit). In this way, you can really start to analyse how things go wrong. Here's what I've learnt - which I also can apply to every day life - about golf.

1. Failure Is A Lot Easier Than Success
You only need to do one thing badly to hit a bad shot and fail. To succeed, you need to do everything well simultaneously. And then do this every shot.

2. Our Response To Failure
Every time I hit a bad shot, I struggle to not get frustrated. All the work I've put into practising, and this rubbish shot is what I have to show for it? It's important to address our frustration and our anger with failure, and then to get rid of it. The anger doesn't help: it's only there because we aren't achieving the expectations we arbitrarily set in our heads. Even after knowing this, it is a constant effort to address my emotions and keep them in check if I hit a bad shot... but this effort is getting easier over time, the more I work at it. What we can do with failure after this - rather than to get angry with it - is to learn from it.

3. Actively Seek Out Failure

Every failure is feedback. We should seek out the areas where we fail, so that we can analyse what’s going wrong. It’s often easier to analyse how to change what we’re doing wrong than analyse how to continue what we’re doing right. This is because of point no. 1: to be successful, we need to do a lot of things right in parallel. But to fail, we only need to do one thing wrong to fail. In this way, it's easier to isolate individual things we're doing wrong to change them, rather than work out all the things we're doing right.

4. Focus On The Dominant Failure Mechanism
There may be 100 things wrong with your golf game every time you play, but usually there's one specific thing that stands out and is stopping you from progressing. You need to work out what that one dominant thing is and focus on it, until it becomes negligible. After that, you'll see a big boost in performance and then start to plateau again. This is when another failure mechanism starts becoming dominant.

A while ago, I struggled to hit the ball in the middle of the club face consistently. Pretty amateur. I couldn't get a consistently good shot at all with that problem. Now that's fixed I've got another. At the moment, I know my drives are swinging uncontrollably to the right and this is due to a tailing club-face (i.e: my wrists aren't being stiff enough and allowing the inertia of the club to make it lag behind the arc of my swinging arms, opening up the club face and making the ball slice to the right).

(Also, in quite a funny way, another dominant limiting mechanism in the rate of my progression turns out to be my vision. When I hit the ball far, my eyes just aren't good enough to follow it. Which means I have no idea if I actually hit a good shot or not. The solution to this? Get some contacts. I consider it a bit of an "out of the box" problem, as it's not instantly associated with reasons for bad golf play).

5. If You Refuse To Re-Adjust When You've Hit A Set-Back, It Causes More Problems
Everyone hits a bad ball every now and again. It's just statistics. If you're a better player, the stats of you hitting a bad ball reduces. Maybe to almost negligible, if you're a pro. But there's always that chance. And when you do hit a bad shot, you need to adjust.

So many times I've hit a bad ball, gone behind the trees or scuffed it, and then tried to get out through the trees or smash the ball to make up for the lost distance. And almost every time I do that, I create more problems. I hit the trees and lose the ball, or I don't swing properly and I lose form because I'm swinging way too fast.

We've got to accept the scenario when we hit a set-back, re-adjust, and then make sure we're doing everything we need to do to succeed on the new path. The old path has gone. Chasing it means looking for shortcuts, which 9/10 leads to more setbacks. Hit a small ball out of the trees back onto the fairway to set yourself up for success next shot.

What Weightlifting Has Taught Me About Life

1. You can't be impatient to progress
When lifting weights, being impatient to progress - adding more weight on the bar than you're able to do - will get you injured. You need to understand that there's a natural rate at which you progress and not look for shortcuts or try to extend further than your ability, just because you're unhappy with where you are right now. There's a path to the top of the mountain, but you can't jump up in one leap. All you can do is pick the most efficient path and start walking (/progressively overload).

2. You need to form good habits
Going to the gym requires work. Sometimes you don't feel like it. A successful person is someone who gets the job done, whether they feel like it or not. Habits can help immensely in this.

3. Our bodies need down-time
We can't push ourselves all the time. In life, there are often two sides to the same coin. We're in a constant cycle of atrophy and hypertrophy (muscle breakdown and muscle building). Consumption and production. Maintainence and improvement activity. Work and rest. Just like how we can't re-grow muscle-fibres if we don't rest, we need to find a way to balance both sides of the coin. To deny one side would be to hinder growth.

4. Sometimes progress is painful
That last rep is the worst. But it's that one last effort that helps grow your muscles the most. Growth can be painful. Not everyone wants to put the work in. You've got to understand what it means to be successful, and whether you really want it enough. Some people will realise that they don't.

5. Doing the same grind can lead to great things
Sometimes we don't need to go through an amazing process to get an amazing result. Sometimes it just require hard work, persistence, and the dull, daily grind. Although, if we get bored of that... we can always make it into a montage (Rocky style).

6. Doing one weight once is not the same as doing half the weight twice
As you increase the weights, they don't increase linearly in difficulty. As it is with a lot of things in life, too. If we double the complexity of what we want to achieve, the difficultly of it can get a lot larger than double. Understanding non-linear task progression is important if we don't want to get tripped up by setting unachievable targets.

"Blame Culture"

I've heard the word 'blame' being used in a lot of different contexts recently.

At work: our senior leadership team standing up and giving a speech on how, "we need to remove this blame culture that we've got. If anyone's to blame, I am. Blame me."

Recently with the UK Brexit campaign. The 'remain' voters blaming the 'leave' voters for their bad decisions.

The black and cop shootings in America.


It made me realise that as long as we have this word, 'blame', as long as it was available to be allocated to someone or something, it'll exist and be used.

Yes, there are times where it's appropriate to blame people. Horrible people who do terrible things.

But so many other times, like at work, where none of us turn up thinking, "today I want to do a bad job": it's not appropriate. Like in a country, where our kind neighbours were shaped by the information they were given, and are now the enemy: it's not appropriate. Not just 'not appropriate', it's outright toxic with the potential to be lethal. It destroys something that we need in order to move forward. It destroys our ability to work together and collaborate. As soon as there's blame allocated, it dissociates us from the guilty party. It creates an 'us and you' situation. Even if the person you're blaming is yourself. You're the one in the wrong. I'm the one in the pure white clothes, the victim of this situation. There's no collaboration any more. No possibility of it. There's only segregation. We can isolate them, and give them the blame. And their resentment of being shunned will be enough for them not to want anything to do with us, either.

Often a company is only as strong as their weakest part. The bottleneck for production. Is it wise to isolate our weakest link?

In a country, it divides the people and makes the country weaker as a whole. At best it creates benign, uncomfortable segregation. At worst it eats the country whole, each side destroying the other, fueled by mutual hate.

Why do we do this? Because it's easier. It's easier for our egos to take, if we don't have to come to terms with the idea that we might be part of the problem. That the systems and ideals we advocate are part of the problem. If we can push everything that's wrong with this world into a small little box, to externalise all of it. And then send it away, where we don't have to associate it with us.

Because God forbid that we try to relate with the people who 'are at fault'. God forbid we turn to them and say, "how can I help? How can we all help make this world a better place?"

What Writing Has Taught Me About Life: Show Don't Tell (Part 1)

I've been reading a lot of Stephen King lately, and I've realised that he's the master of writing's golden rule: "Show Don't Tell".

The rule of show don't tell is kind of the same as, "leading by example". You show people how to live by doing it yourself, or you show people what's going on by writing about what's happening. You leave the "why it's happening" up to the reader to unravel.

Here is an excerpt of Stephen King just describing his life, and why he writes, in the prologue to his book, "Just After Sunset":

"And now, let me get out of your way. But before I go, I want to thank you for coming. Would I still do what I do if you didn't? Yes, indeed I would. Because it makes me happy when the words fall together and the picture comes and the make-believe people do things that delight me. But it's better with you, Constant Reader."

After reading this a few times, I realised that he's being a bit sneaky. He's showing us - not telling us - why we would want to be writers. Not for the fame or the popularity or the money. But because we love writing. Even in his prologues - the parts removed from his story telling - he's still a master of show don't tell.

So why would we want to use this technique? There are a few reasons I can see why we would want to use "Show Don't Tell":

1. You engage the reader more by showing them what's going on. Saying, "Sally loved Harry" is one step removed from everyday life. In everyday life, where we can see what's going on and where we actually see the symptoms of love, we can be moved emotionally and engage a lot more than just being told, "this is this". Readers want to be transported and feel like they're living in the story, not feel like they're being told it.

2. You don't want to insult the reader. By explicitly spelling something out for the reader, you're almost suggesting that they aren't able to interpret the symptoms and come to the right conclusions themselves, so you'll just tell them instead.

3. Sometimes there may be multiple causes for one set of symptoms.  And who are you to tell the reader that they should interpret something in a specific way, if there are many ways to interpret it? Moreover, you might be missing a chance to fully show the rich, colourful diversity of something's origins by attempting to explain it. In attempting to explain it, you would make it bland through black-and-white over-simplification.

4. It's a sign of poor writing, in and of itself. If you need to resort to telling the reader how to interpret something, you haven't shown something well enough for the reader to come to the same conclusion as what you're trying to say. If you haven't described the symptoms of, "Sally loving Harry" well enough, the reader won't have come to the conclusion that the writer wants them to, so the writer will be forced to tell the reader.

The fourth point reminds me how I feel about art, as well. If the artist has to tell you what the art represents rather than showing something well enough for the viewer to come to the same conclusion, the artist hasn't done his job well enough. "Show don't tell" is really a sign of quality.

5. I got talking to a friend over dinner the other day and he started talking about how he found it really off-putting how some people try to publicise how a picture gives them inspiration. For one picture, on a sunset, someone wrote, "chasing the sunset into the ocean". To me it seemed like this was a "show don't tell" moment. But what was wrong with this?

It's like he was trying to add a narrative to his own life. To tell the listeners/readers the story he liked, rather let the truth just lie bare. Beware of trying to paint colours of the narrative you like over the wall of your life. If it the paint is too thin, the viewer will still easily be able to see the cracks in the wall.