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Great players are willing to do whatever is required to be great, regardless of how strange or awkward it feels. Case in point: I was recently in San Diego to work with LPGA Tour player I.K. Kim on her short game. I met I.K. at the range as she was hitting balls and asked if she was ready to start her lesson. She said she needed just a bit more time to complete her “speed sets.” I stepped aside as her caddy spread a towel on the ground and I.K. proceeded to perform the drill (ten swings with a heavy driver followed by ten with a light one) from her knees. She said the speed sets were designed to increase the rotational speed of her upper-body. She ripped one after the other 200 yards-plus in the air. Impressed, I asked her if she was ready to go. “Not quite yet,” she responded, “I need to hit ten left-handed 5-irons first.” She topped, sliced, and chunked her way through all ten. This drill helped her stretch and strengthen the muscles opposite the ones she normally works, which reduces imbalances and helps prevent injury. “Now I’m ready,” she said, and off we went to the short-game area. She wasn’t worried about what others on the range were thinking. She wasn’t worried about feeling awkward. She was completely focused on what she was trying to accomplish and more than willing to be uncomfortable during the process.
Your Short Game Solution
James Sieckmann, David Denunzio, and Greg Rose
Either explicitly or implicitly, the goal you set is a proxy for an expected-value equation, balancing the benefits that you’re trying to gain against the costs you’ll bear to get them. This is all part of the process of setting the goal. But what happens to that calculus once you’ve set the goal and you’re pursuing it? After we set a goal, it becomes a fixed object. This thing that is a proxy for something else becomes the object itself. The goal is the thing we’re trying to achieve, instead of all the values expressed and balanced when we originally set the goal. The goal becomes fixed even as all the inputs that led to choosing that particular goal evolve. The conditions in the world change. Our knowledge changes. The weights we attach to the benefits and costs change. Our preferences and values change. As these things change, if we were to rerun the cost-benefit analysis, the output would surely be different. But we don’t rerun it. To achieve the things we want to achieve, we have to be responsive to the way the world is changing around us and the way that we ourselves are changing. That would mean unfixing our goals, but we don’t naturally do that. In combination, the pass-fail and fixed nature of goals causes us to just keep on toward the finish line, even when the finish line is no longer what we should be running toward. Inflexible goals aren’t a good fit for a flexible world.
That is no way to start a writing project, let me tell you. You begin with a subject, gather material, and work your way to structure from there. You pile up volumes of notes and then figure out what you are going to do with them, not the other way around.
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