The other day I was talking with someone at the golf course. He asked me what I usually shoot. “Somewhere in the 80s,” I told him. Then he asked me a question I wasn’t expecting. “Do you cheat?”
I laughed. But underneath the laugh, I found myself wondering something else. What is it in a person’s mindset that would even ask that question? Somewhere, for him, the game had become serious enough that cheating was worth wondering about. He plays regularly with a group of other guys, none of them professionals. I don’t know what happens inside a group like that, whether the score starts to matter more once there are people watching you write it down. But the question stayed with me.
Because if we are going to be technical about it, I suppose there are times when I do, what he would say, “ cheat”. I might hit a terrible shot and decide to hit another one, not because I’m trying to convince anyone that I’m a better golfer than I am, and not because there is money riding on the outcome. I simply want to try the shot again. I enjoy golf. I enjoy learning. When I hit a terrible shot, I’m often more interested in understanding what went wrong than punishing myself for having hit it.
I know that isn’t how it works if you’re playing in a tournament, where a stroke is a stroke and a mulligan doesn’t disappear because you didn’t like the first shot. But I would never play in a tournament, or compete seriously with someone or a group. I’m not out there to prove anything. I’m playing because I love the game, and that brief conversation got me thinking about something much larger than golf.
Wanting to Improve Isn’t the Problem
I don’t play with a group very often. It’s usually just me and my caddie, so winning in the way most people mean it, beating someone else, isn’t really the draw. What I care about is playing consistently better than I did the time before. There is something enjoyable about standing over a putt knowing that it matters, even when no one else is watching. Trying to improve can sharpen me. It gives me something to measure myself against, and it can reveal weaknesses I didn’t know I had.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve. But somewhere along the way, wanting to play better can quietly become needing to play better, and those are very different things. Wanting to improve keeps the game enjoyable. Needing to improve is what happens when the outcome starts determining how I feel about myself.
A missed putt stops being simply a missed putt, and a bad round stops being simply a bad round. Both start to feel like failure. And once that happens, the very thing I once loved can slowly become something I endure.
When the Score Becomes Too Important
Golf makes this particularly easy to see because I literally carry a scorecard around with me. Every hole gives me a number, and every round gives me another opportunity to compare it to the last one. How did I play today? Underneath that one question sits a quieter one: whether I actually played better than I did the time before.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that question. The problem comes when the score stops measuring the game and starts measuring me.
And I wonder how often we do exactly the same thing in life. We have all kinds of scorecards: money, career, recognition, followers, possessions, appearance, status, how productive we are, whether other people admire us, even whether we believe we are doing life, or spirituality, correctly. Some of those scorecards are visible, and others we carry quietly inside ourselves.
Without realizing it, we can spend much of our lives looking over at someone else’s score. Who is ahead? Underneath that question sits a longer, quieter one: am I actually winning, or just watching everyone else’s game. Maybe that is when competition stops serving us and we begin serving the competition.
Sometimes I Hit Another Ball
One of the things I enjoy about golf is trying a shot again. It’s just me and my caddie out there, and when I hit one badly, instead of letting me walk away frustrated, she drops another ball. “Try again,” she says. Same club, same lie, same target. Maybe I slow the swing down, change my alignment, or just stop trying so hard. Every once in a while, that second ball flies exactly where I wanted the first one to go. The second shot doesn’t erase the first. It teaches me something about it.
There is something about that idea that feels increasingly important to me. Life doesn’t give us mulligans in quite the same way. We cannot go back and erase what happened, unsay the words, become twenty again, or replay decades of decisions knowing what we know now. But life does something perhaps even more meaningful. It frequently gives us another shot: another conversation, another morning, another chance to respond differently than we did the first time.
Maybe wisdom isn’t pretending the first shot never happened. Maybe wisdom is learning how to play the next one.
Improvement Without Punishment
I still want to become a better golfer. That matters to me. I practice, I think about my swing, I notice what I’m doing wrong, and I enjoy seeing my scores improve. But I’m beginning to recognize an important distinction: we can want to improve without being disappointed in who we are today. Those two things are not opposites.
For much of life, we are taught that dissatisfaction is necessary for growth. Find what’s wrong, correct it, achieve more, win. But what if growth can come from curiosity rather than criticism? Instead of asking “What’s wrong with me,” I have started asking “What is this trying to teach me?”
That feels very different. The first question carries judgment before I have even finished asking it. Something about the second one, I have noticed, tends to open a door instead of closing one. Perhaps we don’t need to dislike ourselves trying to become better versions of ourselves. Maybe we can simply remain curious.
Enjoy the Game
At 79, I know I’m not preparing for the PGA Tour. Nobody is waiting at the clubhouse to hand me a trophy, and I don’t imagine anyone is going to spend much time studying my scorecards after I’m gone. But I still get excited when I hit a beautiful drive, still love watching a long putt roll toward the hole, still enjoy seeing whether I can do something today that I couldn’t quite do yesterday. And yes, I still like getting better.
But I hope I never become so concerned with improving that I forget why I walked onto the course in the first place. I came to play, to learn, to enjoy being there. Perhaps that’s not a bad way to approach life either.
There will always be another scorecard someone wants us to carry, someone ahead of us and someone behind us, another achievement we could pursue. But somewhere along the way, perhaps we need to ask ourselves a quieter question. What am I really trying to win? Because we can spend an entire lifetime trying to win the game and discover that we forgot to enjoy playing it.
Most days I still keep score. Some days I would rather just hit another ball. But every day, I want to enjoy the game. Maybe life deserves the same generosity.
© Dr. Doug Gulbrandsen