"Spend too much time chasing perfection and you'll never invest enough time to learn from your failures!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
Since it's summertime, a few golf stories are creeping into my Daily - because many lessons about leadership, innovation, and creativity can come from playing the game.
Yesterday, while out for a round early in the morning, I received a message from my good friend Anders Hult over in Stockholm concerning my post about procrastination:
"Sometimes people procrastinate because they are perfectionists, and are afraid of failing…"
That's a very good point, but since I read the message right after a marginal tee shot on the second hole, it got me thinking about the whole issue of perfection and success and failure and risk - in the context of golf and innovation!
We all know that success is most often the result of many cumulative failures. It's by taking risks, trying new ideas, chasing new concepts, and failing while doing so that one often can find the elusive and mysterious path to success. But what happens if we spend too much time trying to chase perfection? In the context of golf, that can come from spending too much time thinking about the great shots - and trying to achieve more and more of those - without spending time thinking about our bad shots, what we did wrong, and what we could improve.
We do better if we learn from our mistakes instead of trying to repeat our successes - never forget that!
Another great point is that creativity is the root of success! Examine any great golfer and you'll quickly learn that their ability to get out of trouble defines their game They've got a grab bag full of shot improvisation, spur-of-the-moment clutch saves, and massively creative recovery shots that will often spell the difference between a so-so round a great round. I'm not sure, but I'm willing to bet that they spend a little bit more time thinking about the shots that have gone wrong, rather than focusing on those epic shots where everything went right.
Food for thought!
By the way, today's image was generated by an AI. For the fun of it, I've been feeding early versions of my Daily Inspiration quote to MidJourney just to see what it might come up with. I fed it an early version of today's quote, and it came up with the image I used in today's post.
The day before, I gave it the quote I used yesterday, "Your biggest mistake is believing that you don't need to do it right now." The result is wonderfully weird.
And a few weeks ago, I fed it the quote "Hesitation is the currency of cowards."
The results are kind of compelling!
Futurist Jim Carroll considers his two keynotes for the Professional Golfers Association of America to be among the highlights of his speaking career.