When I play golf, I just play to have fun. I’ll take 2 shots here and there. I don’t keep my score. I’ve met a few scratch golfers who will secretly tell you that they don’t enjoy golf anymore. It is at that point it transforms from a hobby to an obsession, a line which I’m unwilling to cross.
I loved this. Having recently transitioned from running ultramarathons to trying to break 100 on the course, I figured I already had the discipline to brute force effort my way by hitting balls 4-5 days per week. It wasn't until I worked with a coach and rebuilt my swing from scratch that I began to see any improvement and I actually got worse in the beginning for weeks.
One thing the two sports have in common is that good decision-making has much more leverage than in short distance sports like swimming and shorter road races (and presumably rowing, I wouldn't know). Most of my score improvement in golf so far has been due to making better shot decisions on the course rather than improved shot execution. Feels like a life metaphor in there somewhere but im sensitive about becoming one of those ppl who compare everything in life to golf.
> It wasn't until I worked with a coach and rebuilt my swing from scratch that I began to see any improvement and I actually got worse in the beginning for weeks.
How does one get into golf? How do you start? Buy a beginner set (?) of clubs from online reviews? Is there a way to find a good coach (accreditations?)?
> Some activities have smooth progress bars: rowing, knitting, cycling, climbing, bodybuilding, etc.
I am being pedantic here, but bodybuilding/strength training definitely does not have a smooth progress bar. You need to be prepared for there to be weeks, or even months, where you are just not lifting what you were able to before.
Golf is like rowing, like knitting, like learning a new language. If you start without instruction, you'll build bad habits that stay with you forever. You can row as hard as you want, but without proper technique, you’ll never get faster. Golf is the same. Effort doesn’t equal improvement unless it's guided. If you start with fundamentals and practice them intentionally, you will get good. But if you repeat the same shitty swing for 10 years with no feedback, you’ll end up exactly where you started.
For golf, you don't try harder, you relax more. At the highest level of sports, even rowing, I suspect it's similar. Only in golf do we compare the outcome of a ball flight -- we think we row similar to professionals, but there a ton of difference, you just can't see it in the result of ball flight.
My go-to golf philosophy book is "Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power":
> To relax, you must surrender your mind-even the notion that you have a mind. You will find that relaxing your mind is the same thing as relaxing your body. There should be no separation between your mind's activity and your feeling-awareness of bodily sensations and impulses. Feel yourself letting go so that your body isn't "held" so much--this requires doing the same thing with your mind. When you relax your tissues, nervous system, organs, the muscles around your organs, every-thing, then the energy will flow. It is this very relaxation that allows for the energy, or feeling-attention inherent in your body-being, to circulate, develop, and be utilized.
While this is a super interesting post, and worth contemplating, I do not think it is a useful story for the majority of aspiring writers, who often are very good at thinking themselves into a creative block. (Aspiring writer being someone who wants to write, but isn't writing yet)
> Programs like NaNoWriMo mislead aspiring writers. "Write every day" is great advice, but the first 90% of writing a book is often not writing -- it's thinking/planning/researching. There are other golf clubs in that bag. Many writers only start "writing" once their ball is very nearly in the hole.
To use the author's analogy, NaNoWriMo is useful for encouraging the aspiring writer to actually show up tothe golf course or the rowboat, because most people who want to write have talked themselves out of it.
(I would be curious to learn more about the "many writers" claim.)
It's also worth considering how writing a book/post/whatever contributes to an overarching body of work. Two quotes come to mind:
“My subject matter doesn’t vary so much from book to book. Just the surface does. The settings, etc. I tend to write the same book over and over, or at least, I take the same subject I took last time out and refine it, or do a slightly different take on it,” Kazuo Ishiguro says to The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2015/jan/16/kazuo-ish...
I think it's more useful to see writing literally as part of the thinking/planning/researching process, not as separate from it and thus soil for a creative block.
I found this post to be very encouraging. I'm kicking around some novel ideas and mostly I am just building some lore documents. Glad I'm not the only one.
> Golf is not so smooth. Yes, each round is a state-dependent game of error-correction (i.e. Zeno's Paradox). But golf swings are coarse actions -- few swings per game, with no recourse for fine adjustment between swings.
This is a bit of a contradictory statement. The "error-correction"'s are typically fine adjustments between swings. Small adjustments to setup, backswing, tempo, etc. are exactly the sort of thing a golfer adjusts during a typical round.
- "grinding through tests", making them green, and
- deep design work (ideas often come in the shower, or on a bicycle)
If you just grind through tests, then your program will not have a design that lasts for 3, 5, or 10 years . It may fall apart through a zillion special cases, or paper cuts
On the other hand, you can't just dream up a great design and implement it. You need to grind through the tests to know what the constraints are, and what your goal is! (it often changes)
---
So one way I'd picture programming is "alternating golfing and rowing" ... golfing is like looking 100 yards away, and trying your best to predict how to hit that spot. If you can hit it accurately, then you can save yourself a lot of rowing !!
Rowing is doing all the work to actually get there, and to do it well
Bodybuilding does not have a linear progress bar. Sometimes you train and train and train and see little or no progress, and you need your coach to come make adjustments to your diet, routine, or supplements (incl. anabolic "supplements") in order to break the logjam.
Source: Not a bodybuilder but know enough bodybuilders to have heard this story many times.
A few years ago, I went skiing and rode a chairlift with a novice skier and some of her friends.
She kept complaining that, as soon as she got into a rhythm, the ground would change and she couldn't maintain her rhythm.
She didn't "get" one of the fundamental points of skiing; one that is so basic that it's rarely explained. Part of the fun of skiing is that the ground changes and varies and is not repetitive. A ski trail is not an exercise machine.
The archetype of the article is the fallacy that, when someone learns something new, they think the same kind of patterns will emerge that formed some other activity. Golfing is a low-impact sport, rowing isn't. Skiing isn't repetitive and mindless like an exercise machine.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 37.1 ms ] threadOne thing the two sports have in common is that good decision-making has much more leverage than in short distance sports like swimming and shorter road races (and presumably rowing, I wouldn't know). Most of my score improvement in golf so far has been due to making better shot decisions on the course rather than improved shot execution. Feels like a life metaphor in there somewhere but im sensitive about becoming one of those ppl who compare everything in life to golf.
How does one get into golf? How do you start? Buy a beginner set (?) of clubs from online reviews? Is there a way to find a good coach (accreditations?)?
I am being pedantic here, but bodybuilding/strength training definitely does not have a smooth progress bar. You need to be prepared for there to be weeks, or even months, where you are just not lifting what you were able to before.
Aaaah! If only it took me that many swings I'd die a very happy person.
(5 hours is waaaay toooo long to torture oneself).
My go-to golf philosophy book is "Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power":
> To relax, you must surrender your mind-even the notion that you have a mind. You will find that relaxing your mind is the same thing as relaxing your body. There should be no separation between your mind's activity and your feeling-awareness of bodily sensations and impulses. Feel yourself letting go so that your body isn't "held" so much--this requires doing the same thing with your mind. When you relax your tissues, nervous system, organs, the muscles around your organs, every-thing, then the energy will flow. It is this very relaxation that allows for the energy, or feeling-attention inherent in your body-being, to circulate, develop, and be utilized.
Don't know how this affects daily writing ;)
> Programs like NaNoWriMo mislead aspiring writers. "Write every day" is great advice, but the first 90% of writing a book is often not writing -- it's thinking/planning/researching. There are other golf clubs in that bag. Many writers only start "writing" once their ball is very nearly in the hole.
To use the author's analogy, NaNoWriMo is useful for encouraging the aspiring writer to actually show up tothe golf course or the rowboat, because most people who want to write have talked themselves out of it.
(I would be curious to learn more about the "many writers" claim.)
It's also worth considering how writing a book/post/whatever contributes to an overarching body of work. Two quotes come to mind:
“Every novelist spends their life writing the same story over and over.” Danielle Chelosky https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-and-music-j...
“My subject matter doesn’t vary so much from book to book. Just the surface does. The settings, etc. I tend to write the same book over and over, or at least, I take the same subject I took last time out and refine it, or do a slightly different take on it,” Kazuo Ishiguro says to The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2015/jan/16/kazuo-ish...
I think it's more useful to see writing literally as part of the thinking/planning/researching process, not as separate from it and thus soil for a creative block.
Sure, but it requires tidy increments of effort and practice. At least according to advice from a reddit thread about golf[1].
> To make a golden necklace, you must start with gold.
But maybe practice with silver or copper necklaces first, or you’ll waste time and money for no good reason.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/golf/comments/sgppbe/whats_the_best... e.g.: “Get a lesson to identify flaws and get drills to work on said flaws. Go to the range and practice those drills to get them down. Rinse. Repeat.”
Nice little nod (on a post about Golf) to Tiger Woods.
This is a bit of a contradictory statement. The "error-correction"'s are typically fine adjustments between swings. Small adjustments to setup, backswing, tempo, etc. are exactly the sort of thing a golfer adjusts during a typical round.
One analogy I'd make is alternating periods of
If you just grind through tests, then your program will not have a design that lasts for 3, 5, or 10 years . It may fall apart through a zillion special cases, or paper cutsOn the other hand, you can't just dream up a great design and implement it. You need to grind through the tests to know what the constraints are, and what your goal is! (it often changes)
---
So one way I'd picture programming is "alternating golfing and rowing" ... golfing is like looking 100 yards away, and trying your best to predict how to hit that spot. If you can hit it accurately, then you can save yourself a lot of rowing !!
Rowing is doing all the work to actually get there, and to do it well
I wish…
For Tiger Woods
Source: Not a bodybuilder but know enough bodybuilders to have heard this story many times.
What about the back nine though?
Bodybuilding, and many other sports, follows logarithmic growth. Lots of progress in the early years, until you reach peak and start plateauing.
She kept complaining that, as soon as she got into a rhythm, the ground would change and she couldn't maintain her rhythm.
She didn't "get" one of the fundamental points of skiing; one that is so basic that it's rarely explained. Part of the fun of skiing is that the ground changes and varies and is not repetitive. A ski trail is not an exercise machine.
The archetype of the article is the fallacy that, when someone learns something new, they think the same kind of patterns will emerge that formed some other activity. Golfing is a low-impact sport, rowing isn't. Skiing isn't repetitive and mindless like an exercise machine.