There is nothing worse than watching your devout practice routine produce negligible results. I would argue that it is the most challenging aspect of being human. We try and try to get something right, but we just can’t seem to produce it on the spot. This happens constantly in golf. We reach an endless field of adequacy and cannot see the change on the horizon.

This is called the learning plateau. It’s a place we enter after our initial understanding of a subject is starting to wane, and we realize that there is a long uphill climb to master the subject. At this point, we begin to run out of the muster and enthusiasm that we possessed in the beginning. When you are a student, the first few weeks of a semester are easy, and especially easy if you are interested in the class. Once that interest (or not) turns into hours of studying, the sweetness starts to get a little bitter, and that continues for quite some time.

Other than forcefully grinding away, how do we get past this? Am I supposed to absolutely devote myself to this discipline to get to the next desired level?

Let’s say your goal is to become a scratch golfer, as this is a popular goal amongst players in the sport. You want to be capable of shooting close to par any given day.

First of all, we need to decide if this is truly something you are committed to. Do you know what you you’re getting in for? You need to convince yourself that you are a scratch golfer. Are you researching practice routines and following through on them? Do you have enough time and resources to spend on this venture? Are you honest with yourself about your capabilities? It is not enough to want, you need to be. It has to be part of your identity.

Once we have the commitment, then there is the endurance. It’s easy to say, “just keep grinding” or “have gumption”, but no one really tells you how to do that. How you can you do what you need to do every day and withstand the monotony?

At this point, we need to begin creating processes and developing habits that we can easily repeat. We need to break things down as simple, easy, and fun as we can.

Here are a couple examples that work for me. I have a tendency to get repetitive on the range, I know I need the reps and I go through the motions, hitting stock shot after stock shot, and not creating any variables. However, rarely do you ever hit the same club twice in a row on the course with the same lie. To counteract this, I begin playing a course I know in my head. I tee off according to the imagined hole design, take a drop for each approach shot so the lie is sometimes different, and end each hole with a partial sub 100 pitch. This keeps me vaguely interested and allows me to get through the bucket of balls on my least motivated days. Another thing I like to do is play mini games while chipping around the practice green/short game area. I will typically take 10 balls, and if I hit them all solid, I will discard one of the balls until I am down to one and then work my way back up. It is an easy way of letting my mind focus on something else while I am still getting the reps in.

Golf is a pastime for many of us. These tend to be things we enjoy not for the grinding, but to escape the grind while still challenging ourselves. Becoming a scratch golfer is not for the faint of heart, and many players lose their passion for the game in the pursuit. Nevertheless, it’s easier to rise to the challenge when we have a healthy interest in the subject.

If only we could think about these learning plateaus differently, perhaps they won’t seem so arduous and dauting. Instead of a long flat surface with a negligible uphill climb that we cannot see, maybe visualize it more like sword making. We keep beating the metal to remove any flaws. If we error, we throw it all back into the forge and start over. But it’s all the same metal, and you learned what not to do, so you keep trying again until you have created a masterpiece. We are the smith, our practice is the tools, and our knowledge is the metal. It will be ready when it is meant to be ready.

***Please check out Atomic Habits by James Clear. His book was the inspiration for this post.