In California public high schools, students are exempted from gym class during the season of any school sport they play. So, my freshman year, when the winter wrestling season ended, I set out to find a spring sport, to extend my escape from dodgeball, mile runs, and the ‘sit-and-reach’.
After surveying the list, I realized golf was the obvious choice. To my parents, however, this seemed like less an obvious choice. Though only because, at that point, I’d never actually played golf before.
Undeterred, I bought a set of used golf clubs, took two lessons, and headed to the driving range. Two weeks later, I set foot on a golf course for the first time. It was the team’s qualifying round.
To this day, I still don’t know if I had potential, or if the coach just took pity on me. Either way, I ended up making the team.
This being Palo Alto – country club central, collegiate home of Tiger Woods – my teammates were serious, life-long golfers. The kind of guys that popped out as babies already holding putters and drivers. These guys were really, really good.
And I, not too surprisingly, was terrible. Four afternoons a week, all season long, I’d play a round of golf with three of my teammates, my score usually about the sum of their three.
Sure, I improved substantially. But I was always, at least compared to the rest of these guys, exceedingly, embarassingly bad. In every single tournament against other schools, mine was always the round we’d choose to drop from our total.
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Since high school, I think I’ve played less than ten rounds of golf. But I’ve thought about my golf team stint a lot, particularly in the last year or two, as I’ve taught classes at CrossFit NYC.
CrossFit classes are, basically, a high-intensity bootcamp with weights. But part of what makes the classes so effective is that we draw on movements outside of the usual workout stuff, pulling instead from sports like gymnastics and Olympic weightlifting.
While those movements are effective, they’re also hard, and hard to learn. So, as a coach, I get to watch lots and lots of people sucking, bad.
Which has led me, increasingly, to appreciate the value of doing things at which you’re absolutely, terribly awful.
When you’re a young child, six or seven years old, your life is dominated by sucking at things. You’re learning to read, learning to ride a bike, learning to tie your shoelaces. And you’re terrible at all of it.
But, as you get older, you get better at things. You focus in on the things you do best. You keep improving. Then, one day, you’re an adult, and almost all of what you do every day is stuff that you do well.
Learning new skills, sucking like a little kid again, is a shock to the system for everyone. But I’ve learned through teaching CrossFit classes that real differences start to emerge when you see people react to that sucking.
It turns out that people have wildly different tolerances for frustration, and wildly different levels of perserverance. Some people will try a movement a few times, then give up on it. Others will stick around long after class, drilling that same movement again and again and again.
And, not surprisingly, the people willing to suck repeatedly are the ones who fastest improve. I’ve read that baseball greats Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio took more batting practice than the rest of their teams combined. And that the same time Babe Ruth was crushing season and all-time home run records, he was similarly beating records for strike-out percentages.
The interesting thing to me, though, isn’t that a willingness to repeatedly practice hard things makes you better at those things; it’s that a willingness to repeatedly practice hard things makes you better at repeatedly practicing hard things.
Which is to say, the sort of perserverance it takes to succeed seems to be a learnable skill.
All you have to do is be willing to suck. And suck. And suck. And keep going.
