Being “Good” at Things

Golf content on social media is my online junk food and the other day I came across a video interviewing professional golfers that asks: “What does an amateur golfer have to shoot to be considered good?”

It’s a leading question because the phrasing implicitly frames a number as the answer for a qualitative measurement, but I digress.

All the pros give their answers. Some say you gotta shoot a number in 90’s. Others say the 80’s. Some even say the 70’s. Then along comes Collin Morikawa:

I don’t think there’s a number, but I think you have to be able to finish out every hole without, like, picking up a two-footer.

Love it! I don’t want to go too deep on a social media golf interview clip, but…

I love how he breaks out of the question’s implicit framing and really strikes at the heart of the qualitative question: “What does it mean to be good at golf?”

Being “good”, in his eyes, is not shooting a specific number. Numbers are standardized proxies for measurement across a wide variety of players, skill levels, and — to be quite frank — degrees of honesty. Anyone who has played golf knows that scores can be easily manipulated. On a casual outing amongst friends, my “82” may be very different than the “82” of the players in front of me — or even the players in my own group. It all depends on how you play the game.

So saying “if you can shoot number ___” is a very lossy picture of what it means to be “good” at golf — at least for amateurs.

That’s why I love Morikawa’s answer: if you finish every hole and don’t get a double bogey, you’re “good” at golf.

Because guess what? Finishing is the hard part. The consistency. Showing up to every hole, finishing out based on the actual rules of the game, not taking mulligans, not picking up a two-footer and saying “That’s good.” (Or even missing a two-footer and re-putting and giving yourself the make.)

Relieving yourself of the exacting burden of the reality of the game is the easy way to play, but it doesn’t make you a better golfer.

I think that’s true of so many things we do as humans: programming, design, writing, etc. If you want to be “good” at what you do, do the hard, little things that others gloss over. Do them consistently and well, with discipline and perseverance.

If you do, then I’d say you’re “good” at what you do because “good” isn’t a number. It’s quality. A disposition. A way of being.