Low Expectations

Since I don’t have 1000 years to devote to becoming a golf pro, perhaps I need lowered expectations.

I’ll admit, my pathetic goal for a round of golf is to get 2 strokes over par. I make that about 55-60% of the time, but if I see a six coming on a par three, my shoulders get tense, my voice gets strained and I’m annoyed. I’m more than annoyed, I’m pissed off. I rant and rave about not understanding why I made this, that or the other slightly flawed move that results in wild shots or short shots and missed puts and over-aggressive chip shots.

However, on the rare occasion I remember to lower my expectations, to remind myself that five is my goal, not a requirement, not an assumption, not a given, then I enjoy it more. I can relax into each stroke and appreciate the good ones. I can joke that if I have one beautiful tee shot, one lovely fairway shot, a chip that bites the green and an elegant putt during each round, I should be happy!

Is this negative thinking? Shouldn’t one always expect the best? It depends. If I’m writing a short story and it doesn’t look like it has a chance of making it to The New Yorker, does that mean it won’t find an audience? A publisher? If I keep putting in those hours, polishing my prose and making sure my voice finds its sea legs, I’ll find an audience of my own.

Lesson three: unrealistic expectations lead to huge disappointments, realistic expectations lead to increased effort, more enjoyment and, possibly, success.

10,000 Hours of Golf?

Practice makes perfect.

In my “lessons of golf are the lessons of life” post yesterday, I noted that, although I love the game, I’m not very good. I’m not very good because I don’t practice. I once heard a commentator during a PGA tournament mention that after play on Saturday, Tiger Woods stayed out until dusk, practicing putting and chipping, presumably while most of his competitors went to dinner.

To master anything – basketball, musical composition, fiction writing, chess or ice skating, requires ten thousand hours of practice. I stumbled across this bit of information in Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell of The Tipping Point and Blink fame. Apparently, even Mozart wasn’t a “prodigy” until he’d put in about 10,000 hours of work. The same goes for other notables in their field such as Bill Gates, and The Beatles, who performed 8 hours a night, 7 nights a week in Hamburg before the 1964 “British Invasion” of the United States.

According to K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, cited in Gladwell’s book, it’s not just practice that’s required, but deliberate practice (practice makes perfect?) Deliberate practice as in (ten thousand hours) “hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day – that’s deliberate practice.”

So how delusional am I? Hitting the course on Sunday morning, taking a few practice swings and then expecting something spectacular? On a nine hole course, I drive the ball off the tee 9 times. I putt about 15 to (add embarrassing number here) times. The total is probably 30 minutes – at best – of actual swinging and putting a week. That’s roughly 10 hours a season, so in 1,000 years, I should be a pro. I have the hope of be a somewhat respectable player in about 300 years.

I don’t even want to be a pro, I just want to play a decent game. However, I do want to publish more fiction. I’ve chosen to put those thousands of hours into writing, not golfing. I haven’t written fiction for 10,000 hours yet, it’s hard to estimate where I am on the scale – possibly as high as 7,000 hours. Depending on how honest I am about hours spent staring at the screen, it could be as low as 5,000 hours.

I think I’ll keep playing 9 holes of golf for 90 minutes on Sunday mornings, and try to enjoy it a little more. I’ll keep spending Sunday afternoons (and every morning) pounding my fingers on the keyboard of my laptop, and I’ll try to make that pounding focused and deliberate.

Lesson two: if you want to be a pro at something, you can’t escape long hours and hard work; and, double bogies aren’t so bad after all.

Nine Days of Golf

“The lessons of golf are the lessons of life.” That’s the tag line for a commercial that’s often aired during Men’s Professional Golf. The patronizing voice that tells me this irritates me because there’s an effort to make me feel sentimental about how important golf is to a child’s development into a well-rounded human being. Or something like that.

I have an automatic irritability toward anything that is too heavy handed in its effort to make me feel something.

Yet, the commercial is telling the truth.

Nearly every Sunday from the vernal to the autumnal equinox my husband and I play nine holes of golf. I’m a terrible golfer. I approach the course at dawn each week, convinced that I now have my flaws well in hand and this week, my score will improve. It rarely does, and when it does improve on isolated holes, it quickly reverts.

Part of the reason my score never improves, probably most of the reason, is what’s stated above. I play once a week for half the year, at best. I play nine holes. It’s not enough, not nearly enough time putting and swinging to make any positive changes in an exacting game.

I’ve cursed, cried and crowed on the golf course – although the crows have been intermittent. Extremely. I’ve also learned quite a lot about life – about my approach to work, my writing life, relationships, patience, practice, expectations, visualization and more. Reluctantly I have to admit that the lessons of golf are the lessons of life.

For nine days I’m going to blog about the lessons that golf has drilled into me with the bone-jarring force that I sometimes hit my club into the ground behind the ball.

Lesson one: annoying, patronizing truisms are just that.