I feel like I have developed my game quite well over the past few years. There have been times where I want to bring that same progression to my professional life, so how can we make sure these two progressions grow simultaneously? I see many people regress in the sport simply due to the demands of real life, like their job, or their family, or anything else. I don’t want to seem like golf is the Argos for finding a solution for a better life, but if you enjoy some sort of hobby, or pastime, I believe the progress you’ve made in that avocation can directly translate into your personal success.

So how can we do this? How can we take a seemingly useless lesson (like learning how to get out of a bunker consistently) and apply that to our overall well-being? Many people think these developments are isolated to the product involved, but I am here to tell you that in fact, yes, everything is connected.

Naturally, let’s look at a golfer. To become a better golfer, what do you need to do? Well, simply put, you need to learn from your mistakes on the course, know your abilities (and their limits), and gain confidence through a boatload of practice. Golf is one of the easiest sports to measure your progress, as there is nigh infinite amount of statistics to measure, and ample amounts of downtime to take a second to plug it into an app or write it down (you may find that your rounds go quicker while tracking these).

If you are able to develop a consistent method for:

-Learning from mistakes.
-Understanding your own abilities.
-Gaining confidence through practice.
-Tracking progress using relevant data.

…you will have finally cracked the code on how to develop and learn proficiently, and all you need to do is apply this same approach to any sort of aspect you deem worthy of your time.

Let’s just look at a random profession, for example: web development. A website won’t function properly if the code is put in incorrectly, so a developer will often use trial and error, research, and search engines (learning from mistakes, practice) until what they see matches what the functional and aesthetic demands are. Frequently, they come across a point where they do not understand something and need to go to a more senior developer for help (understanding your own abilities). The projects that this developer creates or is apart of, or their portfolio, is how they can track their progress over time. A golfer can look at some statistics on a tracking app, or a scorecard, and a developer can go back and look at their older projects as examples to present, or to see how they wrote something previously, or to see their own progression over time.

How do we know if something worthy enough to put your precious and valuable time into learning? In reality, many people learn skills intrinsically, without much thought to it. They are simply doing things because of need, enjoyment, or addiction. All the schooling in the world cannot make any random person an engineer who does not desire to be an engineer. However, if you have a slight interest in something, you have a built in blueprint on how to learn that subject by looking at the things you enjoy and are good at.

You might say “Well, I can’t find any redeeming qualities in anything that I’ve done. I don’t think I am good at anything”, and this is simply hog-wash. If you woke up and played video games the whole day, you would develop underlying cognitive problem-solving skills. If you streamed a whole season of a popular series, you would be getting a firm grasp of current popular culture. If you immersed yourself in any sort of following or culture surrounding anything you find interesting, and this could included a television series or video game, you are getting insights on how other people view the same thing you are experiencing, and can use that feedback to further develop your own understanding. Many people do this practically unconsciously by scrolling social media sights, or even posting their own content (another quality that is being developed).

It’s important to take a step back and realize that everything you are experiencing in your waking moments is serving your own understanding of that same experience. You see something, or you do something, and that accumulates to your total understanding of whatever that thing was.

As I have already broken down before, if we wish to dive deeper and develop our interests, we need to take our methods from other aspects of life we have already begun to master. I am absolutely sick of the cliche golf comments like “you’re never gonna make it on tour…” or “who cares? we’re not on the pro tour?”. This is obviously correct, but by discounting what you are achieving in golf (or any hobby, or profession unrelated to your career endeavors), you are putting a limit on what you are able to achieve.

***Important note:
-If others, maybe your peers or people much younger than you, are much more developed in something you’re interested in, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t explore it. Don’t let your ego get deflated by being a beginner. There are oftentimes multiple stops along the road that you may be comfortable staying at, and if you don’t begin your journey, you will never get there!!