Golf Flow

will see this perspective highlighted in a later chapter when you learn about the turning points that enabled my golfers, especially Matt Kuchar and Sean O’Hair, to win their tournaments, but for now the important lesson that emanates and relates directly to flow is to learn how to let go of the uncontrollable factors in your life, to turn yourself over to an experience, and to trust your habits and life path. More directly relevant to golfers is that the confounding double bogeys, the pattern of choking, and the maddening lack of improvement may (and often do) carry important learning experiences that we are wise to look for.
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    What Golfers Can Learn From Steve Jobs
    Steve Jobs, the genius founder of Apple computer, was philosophical about his craft. His philosophy of success perfectly captures the paradox of control, the importance of belief, and the virtue of acceptance. When invited to give the commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, he gave a brief but powerful speech titled “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish,” in which he told three stories that summarized the path that his life had taken, a path that allowed him to amass a net worth of over three billion dollars, change the world, and alter the computing habits of a planet.
    The first story that Jobs told was about dropping out of college because he couldn’t see the value in it. Dropping out of college afforded him the opportunity to drop
in
on things about which he was curious; in this case he dropped in on a calligraphy class. Ten years later when he was designing the first Mac, he included the multiple typefaces and fonts that he learned about in calligraphy. These multiple fonts are now standard on all personal computers. “It was,” he said, “impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking back 10 years later.”
    His second story told how he and his friend started Apple in a garage and in 10 years built it into a two-billion dollar company. Soon after a creative difference occurred between Jobs and someone whom they had hired to run the company, the board of directors decided to fire Jobs from the company that he had built. “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could ever have happened to me.” The massive shift in his life enabled Jobs to enter into the most creative period of his life, to start the most successful animation studio in the world (Pixar), and to meet his wife and fall in love.
    His final story told of being a cancer survivor, an experience that taught him the importance of making every day matter.
    Jobs told the story of three experiences that, in the moment, he believed to be dreadful. When looking retrospectively at his life, he realized that they were the best things that could have happened to him, that a purpose was attached to those experiences, although he could not see that purpose as the experiences were happening. His message at the end of his speech was powerful and seems perfectly tailored to a golfer looking to make sense of the setbacks in his or her game:
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
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Why It’s Hard to Let Go
    Many elite athletes are self-described control nuts who feel a compulsive need to control every aspect of their life and their game. Sometimes, this trait helps breed the excellence that gets them to the highest levels of their sport. Embracing patience and trust means changing their whole approach to their sport.
    As described in his autobiography
Open
, tennis champion Andre Agassi was obsessive about every aspect of his game. He never let anyone pack (or, for that matter, even touch) the bag that he packed for a match. He had a place for everything and was able to tell upon picking it up whether it was even a fraction of a pound underweight, which meant that it was missing something essential.
    This neurotic, habitual need for control often allows elite athletes to outrace the others in their generational cohort and get to the highest level in the first place. But this trait may also get in the way of the skills that it helps to develop, nurture, and sharpen.
    Most successful players