The ONE thing – life lessons from the movies

Trail boss Curly imparts the wisdom of the ages

Billy Crystal and Jack Palance in City Slickers

Curly: Do you know what the secret to life is?

Mitch: No, what?

Curly: This (holds up finger) One thing. Just one thing.

 

 

The one thing

If you’re anything like me, you’ll reach a point at some time in your life when you want to get really good at one thing.

The “one thing” is completely aside from whatever you’re required to do for work. 

So if you’re an accountant, you’re expected to be really good at tax. If you’re an optometrist, it doesn’t count to know the rate of macular degeneration in people aged over 50. 

For me, that “one thing” is golf. For some people, it might be online poker. For others, restoring old furniture. It doesn’t matter what, we all seem at various times in our lives to be driven to excel at something essentially trivial.

A love/hate affair

My love/hate affair with golf started as a teenager. I found a few clubs in my father’s back shed and hit some balls one afternoon. I don’t remember doing it more than a few times, but I do remember I hit them well, with a natural swing. Never did it again until my early thirties.

This time, I inherited my father-in-law’s old clubs and took them out for a hit. I was uniformly hopeless. Whatever natural swing I had as a teenager had disappeared. For all sorts of reasons, I was simply trying too hard. Might have been the people I was playing with in an effort to “fit in”, but whatever the reason, I was putting myself under pressure.

The more things change…

I continued to play. Got a lesson or two, got lots of unsolicited “coaching” from playing partners who could see potential. And gradually, over time, I settled for the odd decent shot and the odd par hole. (For non-golfers, that means completing the hole in the designated number of shots.) My game never really improved.

No matter I had the best of intentions. And it wasn’t for lack of effort. But I became increasingly discouraged with my inability to string enough decent shots together to adequately complete a hole.

…the more they stay the same

What was I doing wrong? I played less and less. Got down to just a couple of games per summer. Then I stopped altogether. Years passed. Only took it back up again when my sons were old enough to be interested in ball sports and could play by the rules. Still a hacker. And resigned to be.

Then suddenly, about a year ago, the feeling hit. I actually wanted to get good at something. And somehow, golf became IT. Got some old “new” clubs and went on a quest to discover where my natural swing had gone. And guess what? I found it again!

The challenge

My game is not yet at the level where I’m going to challenge Peter Senior next time we meet, but I now consistently flight the ball on a predictable path and at least enjoy my round to the fullest. I feel I’m steadily improving and I can see the results on the scorecard.

The other thing I’m good at is marketing, having played the game for over 25 years, well before I started playing golf. But that doesn’t count, because it’s what I do for a living. However, I’ve discovered a great many parallels between golf and marketing, a theme I’ve developed in a series of posts over at The Business Forum: http://www.businessforumofexperts.biz/viewforum