Entry 25.8

I can’t tell you how thankful I am for all of you. I started this journey writing just letting my thoughts flow out through the keyboard and onto the page. Nothing about that is going to change. However, I am going to make one change. When I first started this undertaking, it was about me just getting thoughts out of my head. Then it quickly became about you and trying to help you better yourselves by causing you to think. I think since I do most of my writing in my office at Methodist, my focus was on my Methodist University PGM students. I could get into the why that happened, but I won’t. Actually on second thought, maybe I will. But let me finish this thought first. I am trying to be more impactful on the golf community as a whole. Since the Christmas break when I started to send out my Professor’s Ponderings, one voice has constantly been encouraging me about my writing. I know the PGM students, faculty and staff will not find it hard to believe that voice was Mr. Jerry Hogge’s. A constant encourager, Mr. Hogge and I have found more and more to talk about recently because of my writing. There was a day that I was feeling kind of discouraged about it because I felt like very few people were reading it. But Mr. Hogge let me know that more people were reading it than I believed. Soon afterwards, in the span of just a couple of weeks, I received my first constant feedback flow from my entries. All of them letting me know that in some way, an entry had helped them. I can’t tell you how much that lifted my spirits. I don’t find this to be a waste of time, but right now I am struggling with having a better connection with people. Some days I feel like I am a hamster on a wheel, doing a ton of work, but going nowhere. I think it is my constant struggle with depression and anxiety trying to make me believe that the world is a dark place without hope. But there is light in the darkness. You are that light. And because of those of you who have lifted me up and encouraged me to continue this project, I have found new purpose. So thank you.

Alright I was on the fence about whether I wanted to get into why I think my focus went to writing to my PGM students because I was in my office. But I think it’s an important concept to understand. One thought that I forgot to include earlier is that my writing will now also encompass my private clients and my PGA HOPE veterans. PGA HOPE is my life’s passion. Dynamic Golf Solutions has been an adventure, and while it is only a part time venture, those players are just as important to me as my PGM students. The answer to why is very simple: You are all my players. I want my players to reach their potential, play the best golf of their lives, have more fun, smile more often, and hopefully bring those skills to life in general and live their best lives. Golf started out as a vehicle for me to help other veterans better themselves physically, mentally, emotionally and for some, spiritually. I don’t think that will ever change. So PGM students, you may see less “since you’re in college” focused topics going forward. And PGA HOPE veterans and DGS players, welcome. Up until now I have only sent out these entries to PGM students, faculty and staff. I will now be posting them on my blog on my website and sending them out to my students through my new online platform, CoachNow.

Focus, Tim, focus. Why did I tend to write to only my PGM students because I was in my office at Methodist? It is a concept from Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow that uses a messy acronym: WYSIATI. I’ve been trying to figure out how to pronounce it, but I’m not sure the author had that in mind when he came up with it. I’m used to the military way of acronyms, which sometimes feels like they came up with the acronym first then fit the words to the acronym just to ensure that it was an easy to pronounce acronym. But what does WYSIATI mean? “What You See, Is All There Is.” Seems rather easy to understand, but it is a constant theme through Kahneman’s book which is 418 pages long not including the two appendices and citations pages at the end. By the time you finish reading the book though, it does seem like a simple concept. I will do my best to keep it simple, which many of you know is not my style. I am working on making the complex simple and keeping the simple simple. That again is thanks to you and your feedback. Focus, Tim. Plainly put, our brains tend to only take the information that is in front of us to make decisions. So despite clearly having other players that I work with, while in my Methodist office, my brain subconsciously pointed me in the direction of only one group, my Methodist players. I was planning on rolling out my expansion plan a few weeks ago and then we had an unexpected miniseries on Growth, Learning and Maturation. My decision to do so is because I was fighting against WYSIATI which I can now do because I know it’s happening. All because I read a book. Message from myself and Mr. Hogge to all of you. Read. Make it an important part of your life. Important means it is written on your schedule in pen, pencil. You never know what you will learn. Pick up books on all sorts of topics. I know, you are saying wow, this dude’s brain is all over the place today. But actually my call to action is part of battling WYSIATI.

You only know what you know. You don’t know what you don’t know until you know it. That’s it. That’s the essence of WYSIATI. Your brain can only use information that you know to make decisions. And our brains are so very lazy. Like sit on the couch and binge watch all the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings movies back to back without ever moving. And not the normal versions, the extended versions (That’s 19 hours and 52 minutes of run time if you were wondering). If your brain doesn’t have to work, it won’t. So when it is asked to do something, it is going to find the easiest way to do it. It’s not going to go looking for more information to help it make decisions. It’s going to use what it has in front of it. Unless you battle back against WYSIATI. You have to make the effort to turn on your brain and go rummaging around in the dusty corners of your brain for information. But again, your brain is going to be lazy if you let it. It will pick up the first piece of information, blow the dust off of it and act like that was what you were looking for. Now you have to turn on your brain even further and evaluate the piece of information and decide if it was actually what you were looking for. More often than not, it isn’t exactly what you were looking for or your brain only picked up volume one of that information and left volumes two through four sitting there covered in dust. And if you don’t send it back down to dredge up the correct information, the brain gets a sense of accomplishment and it reinforces the lazy behavior. You really want to piss your lazy brain off? Read a book. Not like skim through the pages, like read it for total and complete comprehension. Highlight, underline, take notes in the margins, look up words you aren’t sure the meaning of, and cross reference the source material and other books. But besides your lazy brain following orders, slowing down and actually absorbing the information, with enough discipline and repetition, your brain will eventually come around and start to enjoy being active. Sounds a lot like trying to get into working out, doesn’t it? Because it is. I’m not saying do this all the time. I’m saying for fifteen to thirty minutes a day, activate your brain and get it working to its full potential. You will find that not only will you remember more information consciously, your subconscious will act less lazy and start to dig a little deeper when you are faced with a problem. With time, almost instinctively, you will start to “see” more.

You aren’t actually seeing more. You are just not letting your brain be lazy. Don’t get me wrong, it is still lazy and you will still realize in hindsight that the decision you made wasn’t the best one because “O, I knew that” slapping forehead emoji moments are still going to happen. It happens all the time when we play golf. WYSIATI is at work in full force. You know when you just grab a club because “it felt like the right club at the time” and then after you hit the shot, you realize that it was the wrong club all along? Blame it on WYSIATI. You saw a solution, went with the solution and didn’t ask any more questions to find out if it was the right decision before executing. I tend to see this happen in my own game when it comes to short game. I get too cute. I go for the hero shot. I want creativity and art to shine in my short game, not data and science. I’ve done the data and science thing and while that is my usual go to, I’ve purposefully fought against it, especially in my short game. So much so that I try for force creativity into every chip and pitch instead of taking the easy route when it presents itself. So now I am battling back and trying to calculate probabilities before executing the shot. But I treat them more like a Fermi problem than a hard and fast formula. What is a Fermi problem? Good question. Named for Enrico Fermi, a physicist involved in the Manhattan Project, Fermi problems, or order of magnitude problems, are estimation problems designed to teach dimensional analysis or approximations of extreme scientific calculations. I think a short game shot (or any golf shot really) involves dimensional analysis and extreme scientific calculations. But Fermi problems aren’t about precision though in depth thorough calculations, they are about quick “back of an envelope” estimations. For instance, at the Trinity Test, the first atomic bomb test, Fermi dropped pieces of paper during the blast and then estimated the strength of the blast by how far away they landed from him. Then using that information and his knowledge of other detonations, he estimated. Nothing fancy. But his estimation was surprisingly accurate for an event happening for the first time. Sounds like what we do when assessing a lie, the landing spot, the target, the slope, etc of a short game shot. We don’t sit there and process a mega long formula, we estimate based on our observations and our previous knowledge and make a prediction.

I believe are three key pieces to getting good at Fermi estimation. First, your observations of the situation at hand. Second, making connections with those observations and previous knowledge and experience. Third, knowing that WYSIATI is at play and fighting back against it. Most people consciously only go with number one. Subconsciously, some of number two is going on in the background. But we need to be actively be making connections. If we don’t, we tend to be procedural. It’s easy to answer 5 x7 but estimating the number of piano tuners in New York City is not. By connecting disparate pieces of information though, I bet you could get a lot closer to the real number than you think. But if you let WYSIATI reign supreme, you won’t even have a chance. Go back and read the first paragraph of this entry again. Don’t worry. I’ll wait. Now ask yourself, how did I go from focusing my writing on my PGM students because I was in my Methodist office to where we are now. Lots and lots of connecting apparently random pieces of information in order to come up with a solution. Accurate observations of the situation at hand. And not letting my brain be lazy and give me the easy answer. The more I study, the more I realize that people aren’t good at golf because they have poor swing mechanics. They aren’t reaching their potential because they aren’t making good decisions because all they see is what is in front of them and not all the possibilities. So now the question lies with you. Is what you see all there is? Or is there a whole lot more?