I used to play a lot of golf, and the game taught me a lot. One bit of wisdom came my way one Sunday afternoon from a golfer named Jim Bishop, while he and I were playing the classic old Wilson Course at Griffith Park in Los Angeles. He told me that one reason he plays golf is that it that offers a person the chance to experience perfection. “Every now and then,” he said, “you make a perfect swing.” As any golfer who took the game seriously would, I understood exactly what Bishop was talking about.
On occasions, something amazing happens in the game of golf, when you transcend the conscious boundaries of all your prior experiences with the game, let go of your expectations, and become a passenger on the boat of your own brilliance. You experience the patient takeaway, the coiling in the hips, the shoulders in perfect orbit around the spine, your back leg buttressed like a telephone pole, until you are behind the ball and then, your entire being uncoils through the ball, not swinging at it as much as passing a wave of energy through it, and in immortal words of Carl Spackler, “Cinderella story. Outta nowhere.” There it is. You feel it for just an instant. Perfection.
A golfer pays a price to get there, because most often golf is crap and collapse, frustration, bad behavior and the sudden and unexplainable disappearance of one’s powers. In other words, it’s a lot like life, which why everyone should play golf at some point in their lives. It teaches you a lot about how to persist in the face of adversity.
Like the game of golf, the work we do requires a lot of patience and, like golf, work is all about managing adverse events. The professional golfer, Frank Beard, once said that he hit exactly the same good shots an amateur golfer hits, he just hit more of them. The same is true with our work. Success looks the same for everyone. You make money. You enjoy the interactions. You go home happy. It is the consistency of our game, and the ability to manage adversity, that distinguishes the real players from the weekenders.
It doesn’t matter how great a player you are, there are times when you just have to take an unplayable lie, stroke and penalty, or when you find yourself out of bounds and have to hike back to the tee and start all over, stroke and distance.
Then there are times when work comes together like the perfect swing. When your biggest client calls to thank you for solving a couple of problems, your oldest client makes things new again, and your newest client signs the contract. When a friend makes news for doing something cool and funny. When you begin a journey that is going to take four years and promises no end of excitement. When you get to study with one of your favorite teachers for two hours. When you have tickets with friends for a great concert tonight.
This is one of those days for me, and I wish you all the same. Because we all know that soon enough we’ll be hooking them deep into alligator country again, trying to locate our ball in places where, as Lee Trevino once said, “there’s things with no shoulders living in there” and be asking ourselves why in the hell we put ourselves through it.
We put ourselves through it because we are promised times when perfection smiles on us, and we experience the satisfaction of seeing ourselves and the games we play in a new light, when we are capable of doing, in the context of the game, what we had only dreamed about before.
