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CliffNotes
This page includes summaries of the following books:
The Book-of-the-Month for November 2010 is
Gio Valiente’s “Fearless Golf”
and below is a summary of a section of that book:
Mastery Golfer vs Ego Golfer
This topic came from Gio Valiante’s “Fearless Golf”, a Doubleday and Golf Digest book. He has a large section on Mastery and Ego Golf. I have extracted a few important concepts or theory.
This write-up is for your personal use. I recommend getting Gio’s book to better understand fears and confidence. He is an expert, a specialist in those areas. He has 92 pages on confidence. The book is exceptional.
Here is his theory:
Ego golfers (EG) play golf for others- what others think or say about them. EGs play for the reaction to a posted score. This brings in some concerns if things do not go well on the course. With these concerns come fear and doubt. All of this adds to poor performance.
EGs let what others may or may not be thinking of them to determine their score. A portion of their focus of attention is not on the target, the process, and/or the moment.
Mastery golfers (MG) focus on the target, mastering the process, course strategy, and developing skills of playing the game with no concern how their performance or results will be viewed by others. Their focus is not interrupted with potential reactions to a golf shot or round and the associated worries.
Gio constantly reminds his golfers:
- You are not playing against a score.
- You are not playing against a tournament field.
- You are not playing against other players (exception might be real match play).
- You are not playing for others’ reactions.
- You are playing a golf course, one shot at a time to a specific target the best way you know how. Items 1-4 above are merely distractions from the task at hand.
Gio maintains that all golfers are part EG and part MG- it is a matter of degree. The trick is to trend more to the MG and to be aware (and fix it) when there is a shift toward being an EG
Here is the test to determine if you are more MG or more EG: measure and analyze your reaction or actions after a round especially if it is not a good performance when a player is coping with a poor performance and disappointment.
EGs inflict mental pain on themselves, feel embarrassed, usually escape by leaving the scene, drinking, and/or other mechanisms.
MGs will de-brief, identify areas of improvement, ‘re-load’, continue the mastery path, discard any bad memory of the performance, and schedule some practice as soon after the round as possible (immediately after the round is the best).
MGs realize that the longer one keeps the ‘bad taste’ of a poor performance, the better the chance is of it re-occurring.
Gio has tons of supporting information for his theories, but this pretty much summarizes it.
What are your thoughts?
The book-of-the-month for October 2010 was:
“Bounce” by Mathew Syed
This write-up summarizes “Bounce” by Mathew Syed. I find his work to be very motivational.
Matthew Syed is an award-winning journalist, a sportswriter, and an Olympian. He explores the truth about our competitive nature-why we win, why we don't, and how we really play a game or life. He also dispels the myth about you are born with the talent or you are not.
Bounce is an excellent book. If you want the background, the case studies, and the authorities in the field; please refer to the book itself.
If you want small nuggets that can be quickly reviewed and kept on your conscious level, then read on. These nuggets could be used for a day-by-day desktop, motivational calendars.
Backed by cutting-edge scientific research and case studies, Matthew shatters the long-held myths about meritocracy, talent, performance, and the mind. He weighs the value of an innate ability against that of practice, hard work, and will.
The message is that ordinary people can do extraordinary things if they can endure copious hours of serious, purposeful practice.
About 10,000 hours is a target goal. If your goal is not to be the best, then scale back on the number of serious practice hours.
For example, to become a 10 handicap, you would need maybe 3,000 hours of serious practice (this could include playing golf if it was done purposefully and mindfully).
It is that simple. Success is in our hands.
This theme empowers us to excel. But exposes us for: not knowing what and how to practice as well as being stuck in an “inertia chair”; being stuck from homeostasis; having the wrong priorities; and/or being lazy.
Matthew was a world-class, table tennis player. He competed in a two Olympic competitions. So as you might imagine, he is highly competitive with an excellent understanding of what it takes for a top performance.
In the book, he presents the science of success. He presents examples such as Mozart, Fedderrer, Woods, Faldo, Picasso, Beckman, Gates, and more. .
The legendary Penn State football coach, Joe Paterno, states “Everybody has the will to win few have the will to properly prepare.”
John Wooden stated that he missed the preparation and practices the most. He went on to say that he was positive that if the preparation was proper and the practice was structured/organized that the outcome would be favorable for his team.
Larry Bird was asked “Did you practice a lot during the summer?” Larry replied: “every day, all day.”
Bird, Jordan, Magic, Fedderrer, Gretsky, et al are literally self-made athletic geniuses. World-class talent is not inherited.
Magic out-practiced everybody on his team and in the league. Michael Jordan did the same thing. As a youth, Gretzky was always playing hockey: and always on the ice, honing his skills.
The first chapter identifies the hidden logic of success: purposeful practice. He goes on to quantify and qualify the required practice.
This is the essence of the book. He identifies the characteristic that all successful people share: a devoted, dedicated effort to practice more and to practice smarter than the others.
Matthew talks about his learning the game of table tennis. How his parents purchased a high quality table, and he had a garage that would allow use of the table 7x24. He also had a brother that was committed as much as he was to learning the game and realizing his table tennis potential.
Through circumstances, Matthew ended up in a community of near world-class table tennis players. He later found his way to the best instructor and the best immersive Table Tennis Academy.
There was a synergism to this type of hotbed. Thousands of hours of practice accumulated without Matthew knowing. It just was fun and games- he enjoyed every hour of playing table tennis.
By his own admission, his innate table tennis skills were minimal. You have never heard that so-and-so was a “born table tennis player”.
There is a philosophy about sports that it is a meritocracy-where achievement is driven by ability and some work. But hard-smart work is the actual driver to success.
His findings support the old sports adage that success is where preparation meets opportunity.
One may think that Woods launching a 350 yard drive causes us to be irresistibly drawn to the conclusion that the superstars were born with a special gift of talent; not shared by the rest of us. If it was innate talent then he would not have had to make 3 major swing changes in the last 9 years!
If the superstars have one special gene gift, it is the mental capability to be passionate about their goals, to commit, to trust, to be disciplined, to persevere, and to handle adversity well.
But ordinary people CAN develop these requisite mental capabilities.
Researchers found that nobody reached the elite level without the correct copious practice, and nobody who had worked their knickers off in the correct practice, failed to excel.
Researchers describe the correct practice to be POMP (Purposeful, Optimistic, Mindful Practice). Of the group of people who spent copious hours practicing, the only factor distinguishing the best from the rest was that the best used POMP.
It requires a smart, structured, feedback-laced approach to preparing for a performance.
A key is the design of the practice and preparation. This can be acquired from a mentor. As Mathew points out, one must have a proven blueprint and a mentor to provide direction, support, and accountability.
A vital element to the blueprint for success and the fastest track is clear, nonjudgmental, continuous, and immediate feedback.
Top performers devote thousands of additional hours to the task of becoming master performers. Mathew has found that the required number of POMP hours, independent of the field, was 10,000 hours at 1,000 hours/year (you cannot stay purely focused longer than that)- in other words, it takes about 10 years to become a master.
Don’t panic if you do not have 10 years nor do you want to be the best. Mathew has found that success is nearly linear to the number of POMP hours.
You can accomplish a high degree of competence that seem so far beyond your current capabilities. Their findings, grounded in recent cognitive neuroscience, attest to the way the body and mind can be transformed with specialized practice.
Jack Nicklaus, the (arguably) most successful golfer of all time, has made the same point. “Nobody, but nobody has ever become a really proficient golfer without practice, without doing a lot of thinking and hitting a lot of shots.
Lack of consistency frustrates most players. The only answer to that is more POMP.
People dismiss their own potential with statements like: “I am not a natural athlete”, “I am so uncoordinated at golf” or “What a klutz I am.”
Poppycock! Check with those people about their blueprint or plan and how many hours of serious practice they have logged. They will be short in these essentials.
If you believe that attaining excellence is from innate talent, you are likely to give up- even if we show early promise.
On the other hand, if you believe that talent is only marginally implicated in your future achievements, you are likely to push for excellence.
In the latter situation, we will be inclined to move heaven and earth to get the right opportunities for ourselves, the correct mentor, and access to the correct facilities. The entire coalition of these factors leads to the top.
The foundation of this book comes from the renowned researcher, Anders Erickson. His work is referenced in most books concerning what it takes to be successful.
Great performers are self-made.
For example, when Kobe Bryant takes an “off day” from practice. He ends up shooting about 800 shots in the gym.
There are evidently no limits to improvements with practice.
Erickson states: “What we see again and again is the remarkable potential of ordinary adults and their amazing capacity for change with practice. This is tantamount to a revolution in our understanding of expert performance.”
It is in absurd to move Tiger Woods or Jordan or whoever to baseball, to football, or to hockey and expect him to perform expertly in every arena.
Jordan showed he was just okay in baseball- and the reason is that he had not logged the POMP hours in that sport. Obviously his world class ability to focus and concentrate carried over, but his physical skills of hitting, catching, and throwing skills were poor for a professional baseball player due to lack of POMP.
All the great ones realize that knowledge is power, and that perfect practice is the secret.
The path to excellence is directed by the power and importance of practice.
But mere experience, if not matched by deep concentration, does not translate into excellence.
Do not practice on auto-pilot. This is not perfect practice.
Perfect practice or POMP is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something. Research, across all domains, shows that the top performers work at what they can't do well or their weakest ‘link’.
Every second of every minute of every hour, the goal is to extend one's mind-body-technique components to push oneself beyond the limits of one's capability at that time, to engage so deeply in the task that one leaves the training session, literally, a changed person. That is effective practice.
So great ones, like Gretzky, actually practice smarter and more focused during the many hours of practice.
Researchers have found that the major difference between elite skaters and their less elite counterparts is not to be found in genetics, personality, or family background. Rather it is to be found in the battle called practice and how many times they have fallen in practice.
Elite skaters regularly attempt jumps beyond their current capabilities; less elite skaters do not. Obviously there's more to it than just that.
Top skaters fall more often during their training sessions than the others.
Excellence is stepping outside the comfort zone, training with the spirit of endeavor, and excepting the inevitable trials and tribulations and falls. Progress is built in fact upon the foundations of necessary failure.
It has been estimated that Sizuka Arakawa of Japan, one of the greatest skaters ever, fell more than 20,000 times in her progression from a five-year-old novice to be 2006 Olympic champion. “Landing on her butt 20,000 times is where great performances come from.”
Do not think that you can fall on your butt 20,000 times and automatically become an Olympian champ. Sizuka made each fall a learning experience that put her one fall closer to excellence. She did not interpret falling down as failure. She did not fail-she merely fell.
All players make plenty of mistakes as they seek to master the skills. There is a lot of adversity. In golf there are a lot of bad shots. There is disappointment.
This is a path to excellence. The body and mind and technique can radically be altered with the right kind of practice. When the human body is put under exceptional strain a range of dominant genes in the DNA are expressed, an extraordinary physiological processes are activated.
Here is some technical stuff is worth wading through: Over time, the cells of the body reorganizes in response to metabolic demands of the activity. For example, increases in the number of capillaries supplying blood to the muscles.
A key aspect of brain transformation is myelin (more on myelin, which is responsible for skill development, later): a substance wrapped around the nerve fibers and that can dramatically increases speed with which signals pass through the brain. There is a direct relationship between the numbers of hours practice, and the quantity and quality of myelin.
Purposeful practice also builds new neural connections, increases the size of specific sections of the brain, and enables the expert to cooperate with new areas of gray matter in the quest to improve.
Matthew has seen that in any complex task, it is knowledge that facilitates developing skills to a state of excellence; the kind of knowledge is built through deep experience, and encoded in the brain and central nervous system.
Purposeful practice or POMP is:
- Not easy, but it is breathtakingly effective.
- Transformative.
- A source of physical and emotional semi-pain- it hurts!.
- Not something average people want to do.
- ‘Eureka moments” are not lightning bolts from the blue, but more like tidal waves that erupt following deep immersion in an area of expertise.
Picasso spent his early years painstakingly carefully drawing eyes in the human body in difficult poses: not just a few hours or a few weeks, but countless hours studiously learning his craft.
Picasso’s “creative genius” was not all that evident in his early career.
The cost of his early failures were not in conflict with his later found genius; they were part and parcel of it. It was only after trying and often failing that Picasso was able to build a knowledge necessary for the eruption of creativity.
It was precisely the same story for Mozart. In Mozart's case, his masterpieces emerged only after 18 years of practice.
The 10 year rule for creativity has been found across the spectrum of human endeavor.
It has been found that creativity is a function of how hard you work at it.
Even the Beatles needed 10 years of intensive collaboration before entering what has been called their middle period.
The author agrees with me that a player to watch a video of his practice session to gain access to a third person perspective, enabling him to discuss the session with his coach.
For experts, biomechanical noise is not allowed to disrupt the performance.
The correct instructors can design practice sessions so that feedback is embedded in the drills, leading to automatic adjustments without saying a word. This improves the quality of the feedback and it becomes a feedback loop with little or no noise.
The talent myth of expertise is not merely flawed, in theory; it is insidious and robs individuals and institutions of the motivation to change themselves.
Even if you can't bring yourself to embrace the idea that expertise is ultimately about the quality and quantity of practice (a fact supported with case studies and research), can't you accept that practice is far more significant than previously thought?
Each and every one of us has the potential to tread the path to excellence. If you are lazy, or you sit back and you don't want to excel, you'll get nothing. If you work hard enough on the right stuff, you'll be given what you deserve.
Motivational jolts are required for you to endure the countless hours of practice. You get your energy from these motivational jolts. Seek out these motivational jolts or motivational sparks.
The attainment of excellence is a long-term process. Ignition does not provide a shortcut; rather it is the spark that starts one out and steadies the course on a long and arduous path to excellence.
We have all met individuals who started out with gusto, only to fizzle away when discouraged with challenges, adversities, and difficulties.
The motivational sparks represent a method of ‘getting out of your chair’ or Just Do It Now!
The superstars do not see failure. They see opportunity, a challenge, growth, and new knowledge. They do not focus on reasons for failure; they focus on preparing better and improving the purposeful practice.
The hand you're dealt is just the starting point. People may differ in every possible way including their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments. However, everybody can change and grow through application and experience.
Michael Jordan says “I've missed more than 9000 shots. I've lost more than 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted take the game-winning shot and missed.
Thomas Edison, the great American inventor made precisely the same point by saying: “if I find 10,000 ways something won't work. I haven't failed. I am not discouraged and because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”
Think of life as coming to a fork in the road: one way leading to mediocrity, the other to excellence. The path to mediocrity is flat and straight and you don't have to exert any energy to follow that path. It is effortless non-progress.
But the path to excellence could not be more different. It is steep, grueling, and arduous. It is an immensely lengthy, requiring a minimum of 10,000 hours of lung busting effort to get to the summit. And most of all, its forces many voyagers to stumble and fall on every single stretch of the journey. (Zone Golf Academy has designed a practice regimen to follow the guidelines and requirements in this book- see below.)
This is the defining feature of purposeful practice, without which excellence is unattainable. Excellence is about striving for, what is just out of reach and not quite making it; it is about grabbling with tasks beyond current limitations and falling short again and again. The paradox of excellence is that it is built upon the foundation of necessary failures.
A growth mindset is perfectly suited to achieve excellence; a fixed mindset, to the achievement of mediocrity. I
If your chosen destination is within the domain of excellence, you'd better have a growth mindset. A spark ignited in a fixed mind is likely to be extinguished at the first sign of failure.
Not only does the deep practice direct you to excellence, it handles adversity and failure better. “I just need more practice” is easier to keep you on the right path than “I do not have the talent to consistently perform at the highest level”.
Being praised for your extra efforts is more productive than being praised for intelligence or innate talent.
Praise for intelligence and talent prompts a player to not prepare as thoroughly through deep practice. Whereas praise for hard/smart work encourages golfers to take on new challenges in practice
I feel that Nick Bollettieri does not get credit for his common genius. He has a published creed that is signed by all his players. It goes like this: “Every endeavor pursued with passion produces a successful outcome regardless of the result. For it is not about winning or losing-rather the effort put forth in producing the outcome. The best way to predict the future is to create it-therefore, we believe we have the best training methods to help each aptly achieve their dreams and goals, and ultimately reach their ability level in the arena of sports and life.”
Praise for effort rather than talent helps to orient students toward a growth mindset. This produces dramatic consequences.
A growth mindset is a requirement to enduring the arduous practices as well as the inevitable failures along the way.
This suggests an “aftercare service” following a long training and learning time period. We need to carry forward all of the ‘praise for effort’ dialogue forever.
One can benefit from false beliefs. The placebo effect provides a prism through which to understand how top athletes and other top performers are so consistently able to hit peak performance when it really matters.
Norman Vincent Peale states :"I am now convinced that if you expect the best, you are given some strange kind of power to create the conditions that produce the desired results”
According to Mathew, this ‘placebo effect’ is “an exaggerated belief in the efficacy of the self; to remove uncertainty by building conviction in one’s capacity to achieve. That is why athletes refuse to entertain the possibility of defeat- they are aware that doubt is a dangerous theme when on the field of play.”
Perhaps the pioneer of sport psychology, Tim Gallwey, states that “Doubt is the fundamental cause of error in sports.”
The power of doubt lies in its self-fulfilling nature. This is the essence of any game. When we entertain a lack of faith that we can sink a short putt, we usually tighten up, increasing likelihood of missing the putt. When we fail, our self-doubt is confirmed and things snow ball on us.
The doubt becomes stronger and its inhibiting influence on our true capabilities more pronounced.
One technique to eliminate doubt is simply associate with a seemingly difficult task with a simple task, preferably one that has never failed. For example, when addressing a 10 foot you write might remember the action of simply picking up a ball out of the hole, or even putting in a 4 inch putt.
The true professional doesn't listen to doubt.
Irrational optimism is a goal. The great irony of performance psychology is that it teaches each sportsman to believe, as far as he is able to, that he will perform well. No winner doubts. No winner indulges inner critic skepticism.
A doubt, to an athlete is poison. Progress is made by ignoring certain evidence; it is about creating a mindset that is immune to doubt and uncertainty.
Top athletes have learned to filter out unwanted evidence in order to sustain an exaggerated belief in their own abilities.
Doublethink is an essential to the success of leading athletes and other top performers.
Top golfers sometimes train themselves to be irrationally optimistic about execution.
In a famous test case, positive thinking group completed the task significantly more quickly and more accurately than the negative thinking group. There was no difference in the ability between the two groups. This proved that even irrational positive beliefs can boost performance, provided they are held with sufficient conviction.
We should accentuate the positives; suppress the negatives; block out the traumas; and create many narratives about our successes.
World-class performers take these mental manipulations to greater extremes. They have taught themselves to ratchet up their optimism at the point of performance; to mold the evidence to fit their beliefs rather than the other way around. They activate doublethink.
The author spends time talking about the choking event. His findings are not consistent with other authors, so I have not summarized this chapter.
The Zone Golf Academy has developed a practice system to best prepare you to successfully perform.
Do not get scared off the path by the author’s “10,000 hours is required. We have developed a ‘fastest track’ method, with proven and documented results, to get to your goals sooner than Mathew Syed states.
It is a step-by-step blueprint with accountability elements in place.
This system was developed to accommodate the principles and guidelines presented in this book. We also include special considerations for people 50+ years of age.
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