Captured thoughts

Many a thought has congealed in my brain over the last few months.  And any conclusive insight is worthy of an essay, explaining the context, the new information, the logic, and therefore the conclusion, all packaged in an analogy to act as the sugar which helps the medicine go down.

But I've not felt prolific enough to sit down at the keyboard and develop these records of progress and instead, off they go, some forgotten, some put into regular use, some stumbled upon and rediscovered and rearranged without me remarking on the remarkable.

So let me capture a few of these thoughts here, while the coffee is still warm and the brain is fresh; perhaps for future development or simply to know that I've had them and wonder at some future date whence they came and where they went and how I could have been so undeveloped in my thinking to have considered them novel or insightful in the first place.  For the world is not so complex; there is nothing new; an much more can be achieved by applying time-tested principals than trying to develop new ones.

Linear thinking

We are all so skilled at multi tasking, at noting the squirrels that interrupt our thought processes, and gathering fleeting ideas and noting them before they scatter just out of reach that we think brainstorming and mind mapping are the way to think. They are but and early stage of thinking.  We are proposing ideas, identifying avenues, coming up with hypotheses.  We are dealing in potentials.  This can be active, it can be group or individual, it can be done while performing a separate task,* but these establish boundaries, identify goals and obstacles. 

Thinking is the processing of the obstacles and the boundaries through which we must travel to achieve our goal.  And there's nothing so amazing as sitting down with a pen and paper to process.  Linear thinking.  Start writing and work your way through without chasing a distracting squirrel.  Give yourself fifteen minutes, half an hour, and you'll be amazed at what you can come up with.  Most problems can be solved with short bursts of hard thinking on a single process.  The pen (or the keyboard or the state-machine drawing) has the ability to focus and distill the random thinking and the processing into a cohesive narrative.

Friendship

I was asked by one of the younger Toadrollers how one makes friends.  My first thought was that I don't have any, how can I advise? 

But that isn't true.  What I don't have is any I pal around with, clubs I belong to, families that the Toadroller family visits or vacations with.  Between family and career, I have enough excuse in the world not to pursue a good buddy.  When the time is right, such buddies will appear.  Perhaps (and most likely) through a common hobby or pursuit- golf, motorcycles, what have you.  For now, relationships come from the families of childrens' friends, mentors, and my brothers in arms in business with whom I've been through battles and with whom I've shared the toasts of victory and defeat.

Dear friends are the result of such shared engagements of the past.  Who, by chance, was on the same floor in a dorm?  Who was your lab partner?  Who else had a shared interest in a project?   Time and reflection and occasional communications celebrate the relationship, if for no better reason than nostalgia.  Good times, indeed.  The battles you fight today become the memories tomorrow.  Enjoy that journey along the way and you'll have a friend for all times.

Learning to compete

When the eldest Toadroller visited a few months ago, we played pool and golf.  Though I am by all measurements a competitive person, I don't compete to win.  He pointed this out over a game of eight ball.  He had no idea the impact it had on me.

I like to think my passive aggressive, sarcastic, and competitive nature was honed through an adolescence in the northeast, a near-Boston culture where survival was based on being, well, a dick to people without them really knowing it.  Plant a little time-bomb of an insult and, should the victim think about it in the future, they'll realize they were bettered.  Can I blame it on jerky rich kids?  It's as good an excuse as any, but the passive-aggressive nature remains.

I like to think that I temper this in competition.  I compete to prove to the other that I can beat them, but choose not to.  Call it strutting or showing off, but I will compete to just below the level of my competition, with my excuse being that I could have won if I chose to, so that's as good as a victory.

What an ego.

The truth is that people really aren't impressed that I could have beat them.  They probably never even give it a second thought.  The truth is that I'm not good enough to win and have never made the next level or applied the focus in the moment necessary to win.  With that insight, I started to recognize the things I wasn't doing, and the things I had to do in order to win.  And focused on eliminating mistakes and incorporating the tactics to bring about my result. 

In the world of billiards, it has been ball control and shot selection for the next shot.  Which choice will lead me to a better result?  No shot attempts without knowing what the next shot will be.  From there you learn how the ball reacts to the target ball, the carom off the bumper, power and touch.  In golf, it has been concentration, information gathering, wedge play, and focusing on the putts.  And eliminating carelessness to avoid scores greater than a bogey.  My last four rounds have been in the low 80s, with 38s on both sides of the 18.  Improvement is there, and I just seem to know how to focus. I make the right decisions.  I execute the right shots.  This feeds itself and improves my score.

For what it's worth, winning here is not meant to be a defeat at the cost of the loser, but winning as a success and completion, achievement of a goal and process.

Giving up

At a recent team meeting, we had a keynote speaker who had climbed Everest and had jogged across Canada for a charity cause.  He naturally took his experiences and related them as analogies to the business world, insights to professionalism, etc.

One of the insights he discovered and related to us was that when you're at your limits, when your whole body and mind are asking you to give up, you'll discover that you can take one more step.  You don't have to stop.  It's those who persist who break through and succeed.  It's the extra 1% that makes all the difference.

My peers and I looked at each other and marveled in the epiphany that there was an option to give up.  We're a group of type A's who had never considered abandoning something. 

It reminded me of comedian John Mulaney's story of playing as a bench-warmer on the basketball team for five years. At the annual awards ceremony a speaker extolled the virtues of the athletic programs because "without them, the alternative is kids turning to drugs and alcohol."  For Mulaney, it was the first time he'd heard there was an alternative.  He decided that he "would become the best at that."

* Over the weekend I polished the old A8 and reminisced about how much I've enjoyed the car.  Yes, I waxed nostalgic.

Well Struck

The well struck golf ball provides a glimpse of perfection.

I can tell on impact what the shot will do and how closely its flight will match my intentions.

When I strike it pretty well, I can finish my swing then look to a spot the sky where I know it will be.  I tapped it a little to the left, but cutting right.  It's on a high trajectory.  Yup, there it is.

But when I strike it really well; when my thoughts were only on my target and the swing was as automatic as tying shoes; well, then I can simply look back to my target point on the ground and wait for the ball to drop in.

Joy.

Slowly, Centered

My back, in this past month, has demanded that I slow down.

While this takes me away from my routines, forces me to abandon interests, and causes discomfort... there are lessons to be learned.

Proceed slowly.

I'm destination oriented.  I want to get to that destination as quickly and efficiently as possible, be the destination achieved by walking or working or thinking.  The simplest of these, walking, cannot, per my back's dictates, be rushed.  And so as I walk, I walk slowly.  I find myself having to force myself to slow down every ten to fifteen steps.  In other words, going slow requires a conscious effort, for it is not my habit.  But when you walk slowly, you have time to notice the sun, the birds, the smells; that it's June.  That the year is 2016.  All good things to be aware of; all important things which are lost to me when I'm focused on my destination. 

Stay centered. 

I cannot lean to one side.  I cannot bend over to pick up something dropped.  I must squat (slowly- see above) to retrieve.  My balance must be centered both left and right and fore and aft.  Within these constraints, however, I'm incredibly flexible.  The proper golf swing serendipitously required just these things: being and staying centered and balanced, within which you execute acrobatic feats of flexibility. So my bad back is great for understanding the golf swing.

The glass is half-full, my friends.

Eighty One

Yesterday, 23 odd years into seriously pursuing golf as a hobby, and 2 years into seriously pursuing lessons on the swing from a knowledgeable teacher,* everything came together and I shot an 81.

81 is not a spectacular round of golf.  81 is just two strokes away from the generally accepted milestone of breaking 80, which generally makes an 81 heart-breaking.  81 means at least 9 over depending on the par for the course, and implies a healthy number of bogies, double-bogies, or worse.

81 is a spectacular round of golf when, for the previous decade, your scores have hovered around 93, dipped to the occasional 90 (not quite breaking 90 is similar torture to not quite breaking 80), and have ballooned above 100 more often than not.  Shooting a solid 12 strokes better than any round so far this year, and 15 strokes better than a week ago... well, that's a breakthrough.

Natanis Tomahawk Course, October 7, 2015

Golf is mentally exhausting.  Every** shot requires focus, faith, and execution.  Successes have to be instantly recalled for that focus; failures have to be quickly acknowledged and then forgotten.  Because now it's time for the next shot.

Golf hurts your feet.  It's not just walking 4-6 miles during a round, it's the role the feet and legs play as the foundation of the swing, from putt to chip to driver. You use your feet, be it 60 balls at the range or 18 holes on a course.

Golf is German-engineered.  Way too many factors and components, physical and mental, are involved in a swing.  When they are all tuned and firing correctly, a golf shot has an unbelievably smooth, schnik-schnik feeling.  When something is off, just a bit, that steering wheel vibrates in your hand as you go down the road.

Golf rewards.  It is a series of plateaus rising into the distance, with tough climbs and the occasional slide into a valley.  My 81, 15 strokes better than a week ago, is a reward.  It's confirmation that it can be done, and that the plateau has been reached.  You can't shoot 81 and fail to repeat that feat.  Golf knowledge accumulates.

There will be more 93s, but there will also be 84s, 80s, 77s, and, ultimately, a 72.

Par for the course.


* Rawn Torrington, T's golf in Manchester, Maine.  An hour lesson a week with serious range time afterward

** Every, every, every stroke is a massive mental-construction project.  Tap-ins can be missed.  Chips can be flubbed.  Don't rush for any reason.