You know what feels really good? Always succeeding and never losing.
Hitting every shot on the practice area solid. Rolling in all 20 of those straight 3 footers. Being the best player in your group.
But always succeeding in these ways, while comfortable and safe, leads to stalling out your improvement.
I love the way Josh Waitzkin puts it in his book The Art of Learning:
“The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity.” ¹
Would you rather practice and play really easy and feel good about your game, but be brittle and fragile? Or practice and play tough and question your game at times, but be tough and resilient?
This is why I have always valued practicing under the most difficult circumstances. When I practice, I drop the ball down and let it roll where it’s going to roll, which inevitably leads to an iffy lie. A golf ball tends to drop down into a depression in the grass rather than propped up on the top of the grass. That’s just how gravity works. So the players who give themselves a good lie every practice shot might feel great on the range or the chipping green, but when they get to the course and they get iffy lies all day, they’re going to feel brittle and probably hit worse shots for it. The golfers who nail the same straight 3 footer dozens of times in a row feel great because they’ve been “seeing the ball go in the hole”, but they’re going to feel pretty uncomfortable on the green of hole 1 when they inevitably have a sliding left-to-righter to clean up their par.
Another version of this is always playing against worse players. It’s awful easy and comfortable to play with golfers that are worse than you. There’s a boost of the ego when you’re the best player in the foursome and every time you hit you get gasps of awe of your game. I did this for years. I grew up playing scrubby public courses where the Saturday gangsome was full of golfers who were worse than me. Some were only barely worse than me, but still, I had that constant ego-pumping feeling of being the best.
But what happened when I entered a tournament and I played with players who were as good or better than me, and they didn’t give a hoot about my game? I often felt very alone and very fragile. I just wanted to get back to the safety of playing with worse players and I would often mentally eject.
Practicing easy and playing with worse players are great ways to stay in that “static, safe mediocrity.”
Practicing tough and playing with better players are both ways to “embrace an organic, long-term learning process.”
Our job is to trade short-term feeling good and long-term fragility for short-term discomfort and long-term strength.
If we can sit in the discomfort of the short-term struggle without ejecting from it, the resilience and toughness that we can build will last us far longer than the empty fluff of short-term ease.
One thing for you to work on this week:
Do a practice session where you never give yourself a good lie. Just drop the ball and let it roll where it rolls and hit it from that lie. On the putting green, keep hitting those 3-footers, but instead of the same 3 footer repeatedly, change slopes, breaks, and move to a different hole every putt.
To-do: Make practice more difficult and play with better players. Sit in the discomfort.