How 40 Golf Balls Can Make You a Better Entrepreneur
I found the following article on Linkedin. And I thought that publishing it, without editing it is a good idea, because the lesson the guy teaches, 1 is showing where and how you miss the ball, no pun intended, and what it is you can do to apply it to your spirituality, to adding spiritual capacities to your arsenal, to raising your vibration, to going from where you are to where you can get to.
One of my students, I’ll write more about him after the golf-ball article, down the page, wrote to me last night:
He went to a comedy show with other entrepreneurs…
The comedy show was good but I don’t understand any more why people have to get drunk to have a good time I forget what it’s like and after 7 years of sobriety there is no desire to do it but man people become idiots I’m not judging it is just interesting I was observing people all night they came in shy then an hour later they are making asses out of themselves. The way I always look at it is I will feel good tomorrow and they are going to feel like shit so is it actually worth getting drunk when I can get high on life
When I first met this guy, he was so far from getting high on life, it’s not even funny. But he actually used the 40-golfballs method, instinctively… and look where he is now
OK, here is the 40-ball article
I want you to imagine that you want to learn how to play golf better. Pay attention, because learning this golf game is going to make you a better entrepreneur.
OK – I want to learn how to hit better balls, and I buy a bucket of balls and I take one ball to the driving range, and I hit one ball. Then I come back next year, and I do that for 40 years. After 40 years of hitting one ball at a time, am I better than I was 40 years ago? Probably not. The time period from one experience to another is too long. Next year I won’t remember if I’ve hit the ball right or wrong. I won’t be able to make any kind of an adjustment at all. So I can hit 40 balls, for 40 years, with no change.
Now, if I take that bucket of balls to a driving range and I hit 1 ball and I go, “Wow, that went 20 yards.” I cannot make any adjustments yet because I don’t know anything. Remember we’re relating this to getting started on our entrepreneurial business, so we could say I have no experience. The only experience that I have was when I hit that 1 ball.
So I take another ball out and I tee off and I hit that one 25 yards. Now I can compare the 2 experiences. I can say, “What happened differently, did I hit that one a little bit harder?” “Maybe I did, so let’s take another one and see if I can hit it harder.” Next, I gear up and I swing that club so hard that I miss the ball… I swing it so hard that it flips me around in the air like a cartoon character. Then I land on the ground and I have stars in my eyes and I say, “What happened?!”
Is that a failure? No, it’s not – because I’m adding to my experience bucket.
At this point I can say, “Okay, I hit the ball with an average pressure 20 yards, the next time I beefed it up a little bit and I went 25 yards, and the next time I hit it so hard that I did 720 degree turn and I blacked out for 5 minutes.” I’m gathering data.
When I get the 4th ball, what can I do? I can say, “Okay we’ve got to be somewhere between 25 yards and bonking out, and because of the last massive failure, I’m going to back up a little bit.” This time I don’t hit it so hard and it goes 23 yards. Now I try to beef it up a little bit but I cannot put everything into it.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
After 40 balls, I’ve gotten to the point where I’m hitting them 50 yards. That might not be where I want to be but hey, we went from 20 yards to 50 yards. Tomorrow I can wake up in the morning and take another bucket of 40 balls.
When I wake up tomorrow morning I’m so stiff that I can’t move. So what do I do? I take a day off. It’s okay to do that.
Two days later when I’m not so stiff anymore I come back and I start over with 40 more balls. I do this every day for a month. I’ve got a lot of experience: 40 balls per day for 30 days, and I’ve got over 1200 experiences. And guess what? It didn’t matter if I failed or didn’t fail on any individual hit.
It didn’t matter – what mattered is when I hit that 1201st ball on day 1 of month 2, I’m going to have so much experience that I’ll be able to make something happen.
How can you apply this lesson to your business? Think about it. If you sat back and read golf books every day for 30 days, would it give you the same experience, the same knowledge? No. It’s the same in your business. You can read about successful entrepreneurs and learn from them. You can learn great business techniques and practices to try. But you need to get out there and swing the club, too. You’ve got to get out there and implement. You’ve got to try.
You know you’re not going to hit a hole-in-one every time. Nobody can. It’s OK if you don’t, and it’s OK if you fail, because that tells you where to adjust in your business, what to try next time. You’re going to find the losers – and you’re going to find the winners. Build your business on the winners.
The article talks about entrepreneurs and business decisions, but the principle applies to all of life. Relationships, health, communication, advancing your career, family, quality of life, your finances, even sex.
All winners have one thing in common: their work gets done, the work that gets them to winning, all that work is done over time, and it is unglamorous.
If you read a lot of articles, listen to a lot of gurus, you may have the illusion that you have learned something, but that kind of learning, that kind of knowledge will only give you pretense, and the impostor syndrome.
The gap between who you pretend to be, and who you are, is the source of most misery. The misery that drive you to drink, to gamble, to eat… because without integrity nothing works.
I promised to tell you what this guy, high on life, has done. He wrote to me, for the past two-three moths about 6 times every day, sharing the results of each golf ball… Of course for him it wasn’t golf ball, it was practicing the capacities he paid me to turn on, energetically.
He dropped some balls, kept and drove home most of them.
The feedback and the tiny adjustments I suggested in each answer made him who he is today.
Is he ready? Surprise: you are never ready. The moment you think you are ready, you started your long way back to where you began.
Why? What goes up must come down… it is both a physical and spiritual law.
All winners continue growing… maybe not as intensely as in the beginning, but yet…
Left to their own devices, everyone fails… Entropy in action.
Now, what are the tools I offer you?
At this point, here are the tools that are proven to work as a synergistic unit:
1. the digging, fact finding calls… can be a workshop, can be an individual call
2. turning on spiritual/social capacities, one at a time
3. practicing the capacities… while talking to me many times a day, so you get corrected… it is easy to misunderstand what you are supposed to do
These work for everyone. For any capacity, for any goal.
And if you are interested in career advancement, and your skill levels don’t match your desires, or you don’t know what direction to go, I have the skill-finder process…
All can be done at your pace.
Want to know more? Contact me in email, and I’ll point you in the right direction.
