Entry 25.10

Problems. We’ve all got them. Back in 2004, Jay-Z had 99 problems. If we were honest with ourselves, we’ve all probably said, “if I just didn’t have X problem, life would be so much better.” I know I have. And how many of us have worked hard to fix a problem in our golf game successfully, just to have another problem surface? Again, I think we would see everyone raise their hands. Unfortunately, that is the nature of problems. You can never get rid of them. You solve a problem just to get another one in its place. And if you choose to ignore your problems instead of trying to solve them, the problem didn’t go away, you are just avoiding it. But are problems really the answer for why we struggle so hard playing this game that we love? Or in life? The answer is no. You see, problems actually equal happiness if we have the right perspective. Maybe a better word for perspective here is values. By having the right values, we can see our problems differently, make better decisions when trying to solve them, and are much happier as a result.

In 1983, a young band found themselves in New York having just signed their first record deal. Unfortunately for the lead guitarist, he had caused a few too many problems on the journey getting there, and the rest of the band decided he was out. They packed up all his stuff, handed him a bus ticket back to LA and said see ya! Now the closest I have ever come to driving across the country was from Fayetteville to Kansas City to Denver, down to the Grand Canyon and back. And that was with me in the driver's seat with limited stops for long periods of time. I can’t even imagine being stuck on a bus that is going to stop repeatedly along the route, for that long. But on that long, lonely bus ride, the guitarist decided he was going to start a new band and be way more famous than the one he had just been kicked out of. He didn’t wait. He began writing lyrics on the bus, found other great musicians and got after his problems. The band he started was Megadeth which has been nominated for a Grammy twelve times, winning one, and sold more than 50 million records worldwide. Dave Mustaine is considered one of the best metal guitarists and just outside the top ten guitarists all time by Guitar World readers in 2012. The man apparently solved the problem of getting kicked out that band.

Let’s look at another musician, this time a drummer. He was part of an English rock band with goofy haircuts and music that combined skiffle, rock, traditional pop and classical music together which shouldn’t have worked. But they made it work and in a couple of years went from small town band to worldwide fame. Right before they exploded onto the national music scene in England, they went to record an album. The record producer believed the drummer wasn’t supporting the music enough and decided to use someone else. In response, the other three members of the band had their manager fire their current drummer. They then hired some guy named Ringo Starr. Pete Best, the spurned drummer, got depressed and did what every good Englishman does when they have problems. He drank. A lot. After a while, he tried his hand at music in other places, but never really became crazily successful. He eventually got married, had a couple of kids, and worked in civil service for 20 years. Down the road he began to play music again and as of last summer, his band was still available for concerts.

Two musicians with a similar problem. Two very different responses. But which one really solved their individual problem? In an interview later in his life, Pete Best said the best thing that ever happened to him was getting kicked out of the Beatles. Uhm what?! You went on to make some money from the band due to work done before getting kicked out, but everyone who knows anything about the Beatles recognizes the name Ringo Starr, not Pete Best, as the drummer. You aren’t linked directly to the best-selling music of all time with over 600 million units sold worldwide. You had to fight and scrape by for a while loading bread into the back of delivery trucks and struggled with depression. Best said if he hadn’t been kicked out, he wouldn’t have married his wife and had such an amazing family. Dave Mustaine on the other hand was what many would call wildly successful. Not as successful as the band he got kicked out of though: Metallica. Metallica has won ten Grammy’s to Megadeth’s measly one and sold over 125 million albums worldwide. Mustaine was super successful when compared to Best, but in a recent interview said he felt like he was a failure. How do two guys with a similar problem lead such different lives and give reflections on their lives opposite to what we would expect?

The answer goes back to their perspective or values. You see Dave Mustaine decided the value that he was going to measure his life against was Metallica. And until he and Megadeth were better than Metallica, he would never see himself as successful. Pete Best on the other hand moved on. He chose new values and because of those choices, he is happy with his life. He decided that fame and fortune were not nearly as important to him as family and function. Now that doesn’t mean he completely left the Beatles alone. He still sued them several times, but I think even if he had lost all of those suits, he would have been happy. What can we take away from these two?

One of the biggest lessons we have to learn is that we have to choose our values wisely to solve our problems. One of the crappiest parts about my job as a coach is not having good values for players to measure themselves against. I use different measuring tools for different players but the best ruler I usually have is the PGA Tour. They track every metric and are constantly developing new ones. So, it's easy to pull up their stats and talk about them. I wish I could pull up your stats just as easily but it's hard to get players to track stats. Even those players that do have usually set their goals against and measure themselves by PGA Tour standards. This is what the world around us tells us them to actually do it. Look at everyone around you and see how you compare. Unfortunately, if we do happen to achieve our goals by solving our problems, we still aren’t happy. Because when our values are set extrinsically, and not intrinsically, we will struggle to see ourselves as happy. Happiness in life is a pretty crappy value to have anyway. Happiness is fleeting. When we finish a round of golf and shoot the low round of our life, we are pretty happy. But then we hit the golf course the next day and that happiness disappears like smoke in the wind as we fail to break 90. The real joy didn’t come from the number at the end of the day, the real happiness was found “grinding it out of the dirt.” If you have ever been hiking, when you reach the top of the mountain, you are happy. But then the thought creeps in. All that walking for this? It’s really not all that spectacular. Maybe your value is money. If I make more money, all my money problems will go away. In the words of Rafiki from The Lion King (the original, I’ll have none of this remake business) “Nope! Wrong Again!” If your value is money and you solve the problem by making more money, guess what you have? Just a different kind of money problem. Warren Buffet still has money problems. He just has different ones than we do. Values like happiness and money are very popular today and how many people with those values struggle with depression as a result? I’d wager a very large number of them.

So, what kind of values should we have? We need to have values that come from inside us and make us relish the struggle and problems. Easy to say, hard to do. It’s easier to avoid our problems than it is to face them head on. But avoiding your problems doesn’t actually make them go away. They are still lingering in the background. For example, we all know that golfer that misses the green and pulls putter. I’m not talking about the golfers who play in Europe where you can putt from 50 yards out or in dry areas where you can run everything up. I’m talking about the players who either started in those environments or the ones who still haven’t figured out Bermudagrass and instead of working on their chipping, they just elect to pull the Texas wedge every single time, so they don’t blade or fat the shot. They avoid the problem of working on their short game and try to make the one solution fit. That’s like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. An answer, but not the best answer. A better option would be one that actually solves your problems like hard work. You just have to be careful not to measure your hard work against someone else’s. That would be making the value extrinsic again. But you can measure hard work against yourself. You know whether you actually worked hard or not. Hard work is a good value because it causes you to enjoy the struggle and journey towards better chipping. But what does solving the problem of your chipping get you? New problems, just better ones. I’d rather have the problem of determining what trajectory or amount of spin I want for the shot and not the problem of not being able to chip at all.

The problem with problems all comes down to one thing. Responsibility. You have to start taking responsibility for your problems. It is easy to blame our problems on someone or something else. “Life’s not fair”, “if I hadn’t hit the sprinkler head, add your excuse of choice here” or “my fitter didn’t fit me correctly” are all the avoidance of responsibility. You are right, life isn’t fair, but what are you doing to make your life better? Yeah, it sucks to hit a sprinkler head, but what did you do before and after hitting it? Your fitter made recommendations; he didn’t force you to buy the club. Good values are ones that come from taking responsibility. Taking responsibility isn’t something you do one time. It is always done in the present tense. I’m just as responsible for my game today as I was last year, yesterday and ten seconds ago. No one else is responsible for it. But it sure is easy to blame it on someone else. By taking responsibility, I can take action. I can set good values for myself. Values like honesty, courage, curiosity and perseverance. When I’m honest about the state of my game, I can do something about it. My curiosity about biomechanics, cognitive psychology and more help me to not just persevere, but to be courageous. I’m not afraid to fail. Both in my own game but also when I coach. It all comes down to me taking responsibility for me.

Yoda wasn’t wrong when he said, “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” So many people are afraid of facing their problems and that fear causes them to get angry at themselves. Eventually they hate themselves and end up miserable. They failed to take responsibility for their problems. They set values based on someone else, not on themselves. Dave Mustaine feels like a failure because he set the wrong values for himself. He started out with revenge and hate, instead of taking responsibility for his drinking, drug abuse and aggressive behavior. Don’t follow in his footsteps. Identify your problems, take responsibility for them, then set values that will help you enjoy the journey to solving them and earning yourself better problems.