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.
Taking a moment to consider the green before you chip on is also a simple concept that would benefit golfers of all handicaps. Setting yourself up for easier putts or the chance to roll the ball in off the chip just takes awareness rather than skill and repetition.
Golf is one of the more interesting sport just from a standpoint of how many considerations you are making and how lies aside from the teeshot are often so unique.
Yes, I improved when I accepted that the objectively correct decision based on a perfect shot execution was not necessarily the right decision for me. Subtle but crucial distinction I didn't have at the beginning and had to develop with experience.
Golf is first understanding what to do, then executing it. It's a risk/reward balance. Yes, execution will fail sometimes (ok, often), but at least trying the right thing is better than successfully expecting the wrong thing.
In so many ways, it's just like software development.
> 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.
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.
There’s a reason that (i) professional golfers have a longer career than most other professional sports and (ii) many sports people transition to golf later in their career and (iii) there is a high preponderance of older players in golf.
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.
The point is those are activities with highly repetitive efforts and you can adjust after each one with feedback.
Golfing is not like this, if you miss your first swing, you can’t micro adjust for the second one, because it’s going to take place under completely different conditions where the feedback you just got does not apply usually.
Running is a great example because a dedicated runner, even a hobbyist, can expect to see 3-5% improvement in speed/endurance or whatever every season. But no runner expects to see improvement during a single run. But the same isn't true for activities like golf or language acquisition (my own example).
First, you actually do quite a bit of periodization at the season level, so you might have a long base block, followed by a more stamina/quality oriented block, then race specific sharpening, followed by taper and an A race, and then rest. Improvement is distinctly non-linear across these phases, and you'll actually start each season fairly far behind where you were at your peak.
There are also plateau effects, where you've basically adapted as much as you can to an existing stimulus and you need to find new ways of triggering adaptation.
This is something a lot of casual athletes don't notice because there is a very steep development curve for the untrained, so you just getting better very quickly. Once you have been training for years, gains come much slower.
From 2013~2023 I would struggle to row 10km in any duration. My typical daily routine would be 2~3km. From 2023+ I can row 10km every single morning 365 days a year without any issues.
Some kind of step-wise change occurred about 2 years ago. It wasn't a gradual or linear event. I vividly recall a day where I just kept going and going without paying attention. I finally look down and there was 14km indicated on the display. At this point I figure I can do 4km less than that every day since it wasn't too bad. 80% of it seems to be psychological. The human body is incredibly adaptive, even over short time frames.
Confidence is probably the most important thing in making progress with things like weight lifting. Definitely in Olympic lifting. I've seen people go from a 135lb to a 225lb clean & jerk in one day with a good coach.
I do like his point about taking all the mulligans though!
Not at intermediate or advanced levels, but for beginners on a well designed program like “starting strength” it typically does.
Once you get adapted it gets harder and harder to find new stimuli that will trigger new adaptation without breaking you down too much. If you're interested in running, Steve Magness and Jonathan Marcus talk about this quite a bit in the On Coaching podcast (https://www.scienceofrunning.com/podcast-2?v=47e5dceea252).
What about the back nine though?
So I guess I would get a decent workout by all the walking I do. FWIW, I have not played golf for over 30 years due to having a hard time finding the ball.
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).
I used to play frequently, and would be constantly unhappy with my round because I put effort into the game. Due to costs increasing, job being more demanding, and just having other things to do, I've golfed very little this year.
I've played 2 full rounds this year, spent very little time on the range (much more on the putting green, as my residential building has a small turf green that I can just noodle around on at any time) and expected zero from each round.
Ironically, those two rounds have been by and far the best rounds I've ever played in my life. For one of those rounds, I actually took a small-ish but still decently sized dose of magic mushrooms. 2 of my playing group were serious golfers and completely sober, and they were blown away by how relaxed i was when i was tripping. I was calm, relaxed, and enjoying my golf but still completely locked in and focused, and still tripping. I was like +6 through the front 9 from back tees, which in my book is fucking amazing as I generally shoot low 90s.
> Effort doesn’t equal improvement unless it's guided.
This obviously has to be false. Progress is made, people learn better ways to play golf and do all the other things. At the frontier, people simply MUST be doing self-guided experimentation and learning from objective results, and since this has always been true, there was once someone who could not play golf at all (because no one could) who figured out how to hit a ball with a club correctly on their own, without learning from anyone else, because that person was the first person who did it. Thus, self-guidance must be possible and self-improvement must also be.
> But if you repeat the same shitty swing for 10 years with no feedback, you’ll end up exactly where you started.
You always have feedback. If your ball doesn't go where you intended, your swing was bad in some way. If you keep doing the same thing without making adjustments based on measured outcomes, yeah, you won't improve. But you can try different things and figure out what works and what doesn't without ANY instruction or outside guidance.
And self guided exploration is a skill in itself which you have to learn. You can experiment for years and get nothing of it because you don't even measure anything. You can find a local maximum and, not knowing the concept, never try something radically different.
When I sat with 30 other testers for 6 days per week I achieved mastery I did not believe possible. Eventually I could cakewalk even the most difficult challenges in those games and I was generally recognized as a highly talented tester.
Meanwhile I’ve sunk more cumulative hours alone into Elden Ring and I have accepted I will never reach that same level of mastery.
It’s a humbling realization how much of my prior greatness was actually just my environment at the time.
But the OP was making a much stronger claim, that it is, in principle, impossible to learn anything on one's own, and that HAS to be wrong, for the reasons I listed.
One analogy I'd make is alternating periods of
- "grinding through tests", making them green, and
- deep design work (ideas often come in the shower, or on a bicycle)
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)
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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
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 ;)
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.
Bodybuilding, and many other sports, follows logarithmic growth. Lots of progress in the early years, until you reach peak and start plateauing.
For 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.
Source: Not a bodybuilder but know enough bodybuilders to have heard this story many times.
I wish…