Why I'm Optimistic on Even the Worst Days
Scott Stallings's business is golf. He's blogging for BNET from the Nationwide Tour as he travels about 300 days a year in pursuit of a PGA Tour card. Click here to find all of Scott's posts.
I was having one of those days. Nothing I did went right. After playing nine holes, I was already four over par and over the course of the whole round, I hit my ball in 11 different bunkers. Eleven! My caddie finally asked me if he'd get paid more for raking so much sand.
Still, when I walked off the 18th hole knowing that I had missed my goal for the day by a long shot, I was feeling positive -- even optimistic.
A lot of people ask me how it is that I stay so persistently optimistic, especially when a bad day like that can throw a big wrench in my future career plans. I have two answers:
First, I have a pastor for a father and the world's most positive mother, so there wasn't a whole lot of room for negativity when I was growing up.
Second, the way I look at it, it's too easy to be pessimistic -- and it leads to laziness. Staying positive requires mental discipline, which in turn makes me play in a more focused way.
On that bad day, I made a decision around hole No. 9: I decided to forget about the end goal and instead think of every hole as a mini-tournament -- every shot became a separate goal. So, if I missed placing my ball where I wanted to off the tee, my next goal was to simply realign on the fairway. If I hit into a bunker, all I would think about was getting to my next best strategic spot.
When I'm playing sloppy, it's usually because I'm trying to move too fast or I've been a little lax with my fundamentals. But this strategy forces me to slow down and consider every move I make. It would have been a waste of my time not to take advantage of the rest of the round to try and get better.
In the end, I finished 4 over 76, which was one of my worst rounds of the year. Yet I walked off the course knowing that I had improved -- albeit in some small ways -- through those last nine holes and it would make me a better player the next day.
But, hey, I'm a glass-full kind of guy.
How do you stay motivated when it seems like the forces are against you and your business?
Follow Scott on Twitter @stallingsgolf
(Flickr photo courtesy of quinn.anya, CC 2.0)