For several years, I played golf. Although I didn’t put a lot of time into it every week, I managed to string together more than a hundred consecutive weeks of weekend play a couple of times. During the last few years, people have mentioned how much they would like to learn the game, or that they “ought to” learn it. When I’ve said that I’ve played before, and for quite some time, some of them have asked “what’s the key?”.
Given that I want to be helpful, I’ve thought about how to answer that question. Maybe I’ve come up with an answer. Although I can’t help anyone to be motivated to start playing or stick with it, and I’m certainly not qualified to give golf lessons, I did learn from a friend that there is mindset which is helpful in terms of success. And in golf, if you don’t succeed in the first year, you usually quit.
During this time I played, the group of guys I went out with didn’t change much week-to-week, but over the years, various characters rotated in and out. Vance was a 6 foot, blond, wiry dude, who could have been a surfer, or maybe a waiter at a country club. He had a casual, confident air, and a really nice set of clubs. His white and brown saddle shoes were always clean (at the beginning of the round).
Vance also liked to drink several beers during the 4 hours or so we were out. His shoes got dirtier and his playing got sloppier as play progressed. His attitude became dependent on how well he played. His breezy, smiling façade might fade into a surly red-faced whine by the 11th hole, or if things were going well for him, he might adopt a manic, superior demeanor which he would wear like a cheap tie.
Paulie was the opposite. He was short, dark and not a dresser. His hair stuck out of his cap at all angles when he showed up, and he seemed intense most of the time until we started play. He would usually get to the course early with his second-hand clubs, and proceed to spend a half hour practicing his putting and chipping.
But by the first tee drive, Paulie had his game face on. And he kept it on for 18 holes. His face was totally relaxed, even when he hit a third shot into sand or water. His stance was relaxed, and he wouldn’t hear anyone or anything from when he selected a club, through addressing the ball, until his follow through was finished on any given shot. I thought Paulie was a pretty boring guy when I met him, but over time, I appreciated his attitude, and his game.
Paulie’s play was super-consistent. Every round was within 3-4 strokes of the last one. Vance, some of the other guys, and I would be all over the place. We would have good days and bad. But Paulie just slowly improved, almost imperceptibly, over many months. After playing with Paulie for awhile, I asked him how he managed to stay focused.
He said his grandfather taught him the basics of golf. And his grandfather died when Paulie was 16. But the most important thing he said (more than once) was that golf is a game of “relaxed concentration”. You have to relax, and you have to concentrate. You can practice your swing, your stance, your posture, and you can sight the land like an eagle, but if you don’t have both a relaxed and concentrated mind together, it wouldn’t matter.
This is hard. It involves practice. Meditation may help, or maybe not. Practicing relaxed concentration while practicing golf means doing exactly that, and that only. And that’s why Paulie came early every week. He was practicing his mental game while performing the physical tasks.
Isn’t this what we want in life? Relaxed concentration? I don’t mean all the time, but in the avenues we pursue which matter. A lot of people have this almost automatically while watching a movie, or driving, cooking, working in a garden. It seems easiest when there is no pressure as a matter of course. But given a job, or a sport, or some kind of assignment, most of us become a whole lot less relaxed. And I don’t know about you, but focus and concentration don’t come as easy to me when I’m “working”. There are a million distractions and “things I’d rather be doing”.
It seems that the best way to achieve relaxed concentration is to consciously practice it, rather than the techniques of the task. Of course, you have to learn the techniques, and practice them, but also practicing the mental portion seems to yield the best results. It sure worked for Paulie. And when I started to understand what he was talking about, I started to try to do that also.
During that time, I was too self-conscious to show up at the course a half hour early and practice my short game while also practicing my mental game. So I would go to a driving range nearby beforehand and do that. And when someone wanted to ride together, I would try to get to the driving range the day before. Any practice is better than no practice was the theory.
A year after I started doing this, I wasn’t conscious of much change. But one afternoon, Vance rolled up to the 14th tee and caught me over on the side. He asked me what had happened. My game had improved so much in the last few months, I was playing better than him consistently. He was half in the bag, but that probably allowed him to level with me without feeling bad about his play.
Paulie hadn’t been able to make it for the last month. His wife was having her first baby, and he was needed elsewhere. I’d seen him leaving the driving range as I was pulling in one night a couple weeks before, so I knew he was still practicing.
I was tempted to just blow off Vance with some jive about taking lessons and working on my game. But I had to pass along the wisdom Paulie had passed along to me. “Relaxed concentration”, I said to Vance, and I described to him my version of how it had worked for me.
Sure enough, Vance busted up laughing and minimized what I had patiently explained to him. It didn’t bother me in the least, because my game had grown and improved to the point that I was having more fun and getting more satisfaction out of it than I ever had. I just shrugged and grinned, and hit a perfect 250 yard tee shot to the sweetest spot on the dogleg left. Vance just stared and muttered. And I said “let me know when you want to talk about it”.
After five or six years of weekly golfing, my life changed also. I wasn’t able to make it out more than twice a month, then once a month, then not at all. The foursome rotated as always, and I didn’t see or talk to anyone in it for a long time.
Vance had been a rising star at a brokerage firm. He parlayed the weekly golfing into golfing with the partners, and the last I heard when I was straggling in once a month near the end of my golfing career, he was headed for seven figures a year.
Paulie owned his own machine shop and had one employee. His wife did the books, and eventually they had three kids. They ran at breakeven for years, in and out of debt, but always making it. I remember stopping by the shop only once, and watching Paulie, bent over a lathe, oblivious to the rest of the world, with just a hint of a smile on his face.
Probably ten years later, I ran into Steve, one of the foursome back when I was a regular. We talked about old times and people. It turned out that Vance had dome incredibly well, but had taken the firm way out on a limb with derivatives. In 2009, he crashed the firm. But Paulie had employed some sixth sense or whatever, and had branched out into plastic extrusion. He hadn’t had any qualms about meeting with a company from Taiwan, which had subcontracted work back to his shop. The Taiwanese company was a subcontractor to a major supplier for Apple. Paulie was making millions of tiny frames for the interior of iPods and iPhones. His shop now occupied half a city block.
Leaving the store, I was laughing. These days, I bust out laughing anytime, anyplace, when a thought comes up. I feel real relaxed around hundreds of people, or no people. Doing whatever I’m doing seems easy, compared to how it was 15 years ago. Your results may vary, but relaxed concentration is working for me.
Over the years, I’ve tried many disciplines in order to achieve what I learned from Paulie. I’m sure many people have benefited from these other disciplines, but they didn’t work nearly as well as what Paulie taught me on the golf course. Concentrating and relaxing at the same time isn’t easy, and it requires a lot of practice. As I said above, remembering to laugh for no particular reason helps a lot. Maybe this will help, and maybe you can adapt it to work for you. Enjoy!
