Finding your Fixed Point

The best advice I ever got was on the golf course. Even by the most liberal standards my game was terrible – I had all the sports acumen of an awkward Jewish kid from the Valley whose mom made him play catcher because at least he’d have to wear a mask. Still broke my glasses twice (always the overachiever.)

Bad posture and lack of any core strength aside, my swing was all over the place. My instructor smothered me with demonstrations and tips and videos and cheat codes to trick the ball into doing what golf balls are designed to do.

It worked some of the time. It didn’t work most of the time. A maddeningly perfect metaphor for life – I kept trying no matter how bad I was at it.

And then I learned about the fixed point.

A close friend and genuinely good golfer saw what I was doing, could see my brain calculating All The Things – feet position, club face, backswing, hip movement, follow-through – and failing miserably. It was like trying to hit a golf ball using a Rube Goldberg machine.

Slow it down, he said. Forget about all the steps. Just look at the ball and find a spot – any spot – and aim your club. That spot is your fixed point. Don’t do anything else except focus on your fixed point.

So I did. And the ball flew, high and straight. I tried it again, same result. I focused on my fixed point and nailed that obnoxious Titleist down the fairway like kicking a bad habit.

Golf is still frustrating – that’s just what golf is. There are no perfect days. There’s joy and pain. Sometimes you question why you keep playing when you know how it’s going to end.

Focus often feels like a luxury. We multitask and juggle schedules and make personal and professional promises we can’t possibly fulfill without ending up in therapy or a mortuary. We mistake activity for progress. “Time to think” doesn’t look good on a billable hour report.

But to do it all is to do nothing at all.

Find your fixed point and focus. Block out the noise and the distractions. Tell your doubts to take a day off.

Then swing like hell.