Podcast Transcript
I recently finished the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. There’s a good chance a lot of you have read that book. It’s a good one. Nothing necessarily groundbreaking in my opinion, but is has some really great core principles in it, and has reminded and inspired me to have some better habits.
One of those things is something James Clear says he does at the end of every year. He does an Annual Review of the previous year. He answers 3 questions:
1. What went well this year?
2. What didn’t go well this year?
3. What did I learn?
So in this episode, I want to go through that framework. And then I want to turn it forward and based on those answers I want to answer 3 questions about 2025. Which will be:
1. What do I want to go well in 2025?
2. What habits do I want to implement for 2025?
3. What do I want to learn?
And of course, I want to encourage you to do something like this too.
I’ve always talked about the importance of a daily exercise like this. I’ve mentioned before an exercise I call the 3&1 Journal, where every day you reflect on 3 things you did well, 1 thing you can improve, and specifically how you plan on improving that one thing. So this Annual Review is a similar thought exercise, just on a much larger scale. Which actually tends to be pretty challenging for me. I don’t always have the best memory, so I can struggle encapsulating an entire year. So I usually just end up not doing stuff like this. But I’m going to not be so hard on myself and remember what I can and get something on paper.
Alright, here’s the look back at 2024.
Question 1: What went well this year?
James Clear takes this as an opportunity to catalog his habits. He tracks things like how many articles he published, workouts completed, things like that.
For our golf purposes, this is a good time to catalog rounds played, scores shot, goals met, etc. For me, I played 23 times in 2024. Which is actually about double what 2023 was. Back in 2023, we had a 3 month old to start the year, and my business was growing. So golf was at the lowest priority it had ever been. In 2024, I finally started to regain some footing on golf and was able to make a few golf trips where I played a handful of rounds at each, as well as a few tournaments which all included a practice round. And then some odd rounds here and there.
So as far as pre-planned trips or tournament rounds, those went as well as they ever do. And total rounds were up because of it.
Question 2: What didn’t go well this year?
I’ve gotta say that random rounds and practice sessions were what didn’t hit the numbers that I’d like. I only went to the course to practice 11 times in 2024. I hit balls in the backyard a bunch, but that’s more just for feel maintenance. If I want to see tangible improvement, I need to actually be at the course hitting real balls and seeing ball flight and reading greens and seeing the ball go in the hole. So I’d say that didn’t go well in 2024.
And from a competitive golf results standpoint, the three events I played in did not go well. I played a smaller local event called the Triad Amateur. I shot 80-75 and finished outside the top 20, about halfway down the leaderboard. Then I played in the North Carolina Mid-Amateur qualifier. I shot a 75 and missed qualifying by one shot. And then my final tournament round was the U.S. Mid-Amateur qualifier. I again shot a 75 at a much tougher golf course, feeling like I played as well as I could’ve, and I missed qualifying by 6 shots. So it’s pretty easy for me to say that tournament golf didn’t go so well in 2024. Sure, I had reasons, like life circumstances and lack of golf time, but that’s the whole thing. I don’t want that to be my reason.
Question 3: What did I learn?
I learned that if I don’t make it a habit of getting to the course, I will slowly and imperceptibly start to view golf differently. Since golf is my work, and talking to players about their game, and doing this podcast about the game, I interact with golf, but only through the lens of other people. In most of my life, golf is a means to an end, and that end is my income. So over time, golf becomes less personal to me. So you could say on one level I’ve lost some of my love for the game. But that sounds like I don’t want to play any more. But you better believe I want to play more. It’s just not seen the same in my eyes.
This was something I’d never experienced before. It’s not burnout, because I know what burnout feels like. Burnout happens when we expect to get something, but repeatedly don’t get it. There were times in the year that I wanted to play but couldn’t. But for the most part I got to where I wasn’t even expecting myself to get any golf time. So it was almost a resignation that golf is going to take a backseat in my life.
But I know that golf is a huge part of me, and it makes me a better person when I get to go play. It allows me to relate more to my clients. Knowing about golf psychology is so different than actually experiencing golf psychology. You can’t ‘book knowledge’ your way into playing freed up golf. And playing golf helps me have more thoughtful things to say here and elsewhere on the internet. If I’m not playing, then golf is just some distant thing that I know about. So playing more gives me the personal connection necessary to do my job better.
So that’s my annual review. Now I want to turn it forward to 2025. I want to set some goals and corresponding habits to make 2025 an improvement on 2024.
Question #1 for 2025: What do I want to go well in 2025?
This is a good spot to put hard goals that I want to accomplish in 2025.
I still have a goal of winning the U.S. Mid-Amateur one day. Which is obviously a massive goal. And in 2024 and years prior, I haven’t even qualified for a U.S. Mid-Amateur, let alone do well in one, let alone win one. So in order to regain that skill, I need more time at the course, which we’ll get to in question 2.
But what I want to go well in 2025 is to qualify for two primary tournaments: the state mid-am and the U.S. Mid-Am. Those qualifiers are in the heart of summer, which gives me several months to get rounds and practice sessions and other smaller tournaments under my belt. Like I mentioned earlier, these two qualifiers in 2024 were clear examples that I’m not as good as I once was, and lack of time at the course is at the heart of the issue.
Question #2 for 2025: What habits do I want to implement for 2025?
So naturally, this one’s easy, based on what I learned in 2024. I want more course time. I want to play more casual rounds and practice more. Again, to reach the lofty goals that I have, my habits need to reflect that loftiness.
This is a law of improvement that I’ve learned: your effort needs to match your goals. If they don’t match, then you’re just going to live in constant frustration. So you either need to lower your goals, or raise your effort. And because I want to keep my goals the same, I need to raise my effort.
But that’s just from a skill building perspective, which is super important to me. But just on a life-balance, self-care level, in 2025 I want golf to be more of a personal experience in my life than in 2024.
But I say this every year. I always want the next year to be the year where I finally get back into golf. So like I’ve said in past iterations of this year-end goal-setting episode, having a goal is great, but I need a plan for reaching that goal. So let’s break it down.
If my goal is to win the U.S. Mid-Amateur, how can I do that? I need to be good enough to play in one. So how can I do that? As I’ve said, I need to play and practice more. So how can I do that? Scheduling. If I schedule time to go to the course, then I’ll go. If I don’t, then I won’t. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself over the last several years of being married, owning a house and a business, and have a kid, I’m completely at the whim of the calendar.
So I need to make a habit of planning one afternoon a week to get out to the course. Maybe one week is a practice session, one week is 9 holes. I know I’ve sai similar things in the past, and what ends up happening is I say “if I can’t play AND practice every week, what’s the use of playing and practicing at all?” I go into that all-or-nothing mentality. And because I can’t do everything, I end up doing nothing. Maybe you can relate to me on this.
So, planning a small, but more than nothing amount of course time would be a massive improvement for me.
Question #3 for 2025: What do I want to learn?
This one is interesting. One thing I want to learn is “how good am I if I actually put in a legitimate quality and quantity body of work?” I’ve learned multiple times over how good I am without putting in a legitimate body of work. I’m not good enough to qualify for the tournaments I care about, let alone win them. So, yes I want to qualify and win these things, but truly on a bigger level, I want to know how good I am having put in real effort.
Bonus: Pre-mortem on 2025
I want to do a bonus here at the end that I think could be a beneficial exercise. I want to do what I’ve heard called a pre-mortem. You’ve heard of a post-mortem, which is kind of what we did for 2024 where we investigate what happened after the fact. But a pre-mortem is basically simulating what the post-mortem might end up being by the end of the year.
What will I want to look back and say about 2025? In 365 days from now I want to be able to say that I didn’t take the easy way out, or get lazy, or go with the lowest hanging excuse for not putting in effort. Yes, I want to have some self-forgiveness and give myself some grace, because who knows what 2025 could hold. But with that grace as a backdrop, I won’t want to have taken the easy way out.
So, you listening. What about you? What went well in 2024? What didn’t go well? What did you learn?
And what do you want to go well in 2025? What habits are you going to implement? Get specific and clear. What do you hope to learn? And do a pre-mortem. What do you hope to be able to say about 2025?
I hope you take this end of the year time to reflect, and then use that information to point forward and build a plan for 2025.
