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The quarter zips are super soft and really easy to swing and move in and their golf hoodies are perfect for on and off the course too. John and I are huge fans, so make sure to get yourself some amazing golf clothing and support our sponsors. Head to Rowback.com, spelled R-H-O-B-A-C-K dot com to get 20% off your first purchase through the end of the week using code SWET. The link is in the show notes, so that's Rowback.com spelled R-H-O-B-A-C-K dot com. Welcome back to another episode of The Sweet Spot. This is John Sherman from the Four Foundations of Golf and as always I'm joined by Adam from Adam Young Golf. I'm staring at a really long shared note that Adam sent me on today's topic. What was long last night? Oh, no. I looked at it yesterday and there was like five bullet points and I just like fired it up 30 minutes ago and I'm like scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and I'm like, oh my God, this thing is, this could be like 10 hours of content here. We're going to see where this goes. But Adam, this is something you've wanted to do for a while, so why don't you tee this up? What are we talking about? Yeah, this is the logical traps or logical fallacies, critical thinking. I wanted to preface this entire podcast by saying I'm super tired today, so if I slur my words, I've had like three cups of coffee and I'm already feeling a little sick to my stomach on it, but yeah, I didn't get a great night's sleep last night, but that allowed me to write some more notes on this stuff. But yeah, I think these critical thinking skills, just to guard people against things that can lead them down bad roads, essentially. We get a lot of false positives in golf. That's what this kind of is. We're talking about here. So did you want to like give a definition? I saw I actually looked it up and I saw like 20 different definitions online. Yeah, there are hundreds of different types of logical fallacies, things like straw men arguments. It's where they take what you said, misrepresent it and then attack the misrepresentation. And it's yeah, these logical fallacies, I mean, in golf, it's more about, like I said, guarding yourself against certain ideas that could lead you down bad roads. I think the whole thing, as I was going through, it could be summarized as false attribution. I think a lot of these things are where we, like you said, false positives, right? You get some either good results in your game or you get some bad results in your game and you attribute it to the wrong thing. And that, you know, if you do something, if you hit a few good shots and you think that X caused it, then what's going to happen? You're going to end up doing more and more and more of X and X might not have been the reason at all. So yeah, I think that's a good summary of it is false attribution, but there's lots of nuances and different variants of this. Or just Twitter, like that's just say, like, here's another definition of it. Twitter. Yeah. See you in every like politics, health, golf, not that I'm, I don't think either of us are the gatekeepers of logic here. So I've probably been, I've probably been guilty of some of this myself over the years, but you see a lot of, a lot of these thoughts coming out on Twitter and you're like, huh, that's interesting. Yeah. I think we have to be careful that, you know, we all have these. We all have cognitive biases. We all go through logical traps. As I was going through your list, I'm like, I'm currently doing some of this stuff. So I'm not above this at all. Yeah. You can't, you can't really escape these things and when you're in them, you don't know that you're in them often. I did one, I did something super embarrassing today. I wrote an entire tweet thread about the Dunning Kruger effect and, which is basically when you get stuff wrong and you think you, you think you know a lot about it and you get stuff wrong and I labeled the axes of the, the thing wrong. And I posted like 20 charts of it, all of them had the wrong axes labeled because I was so tired this morning. So I thought, you know, I'm going to leave it up there because it's hilariously ironic. So I think my, my golf content journey has been, if I'm understanding the Dunning Kruger effect has been like a journey of the Dunning Kruger effect because like when I first started, I would just confidently say just about anything. It's like, oh yeah, I think this, I believe this and I got a lot wrong. And then as I've gotten deeper and deeper into this thing, I get a little more cautious and even worried about saying something because I genuinely want to help people. Like I know I'm going to get stuff wrong, but yeah, I get a little gun shy based on certain advice I'm giving. If I don't feel like maybe I don't have full expertise of it, it's more of like getting comfortable with what you don't know and that's as you get deeper and deeper into something like, wow, I actually don't know nearly as much as I thought I did in the beginning. Yeah. Let's start with that one. Then the Dunning Kruger effect. I mean, the definition I got from Wikipedia is the tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability. Oh, that could be knowledge as well. So, you know, the chart looks like there's, this is me being tired again, there's knowledge on one axis and confidence on the other. So as you increase in knowledge, you get super confident very early. So you might start, this is my journey, right? You start out in golf, you know nothing about it. So you've got super low confidence in your knowledge and you know nothing. Start at the bottom of the axis. And all of a sudden you learn a little bit about the game and you think you know everything, right? This is the person who reads one book about something, reads one book about golf and then I know it all now. I've read Hogan's Five Fundamentals. That's everything. Right? And you'll see your knowledge shoots up to insanely high levels. Then as you found, you start to learn more and more about the game, about the nuances of it. Maybe you put this stuff into practice. You know, this was me putting into practice all the books that I read and then found that it didn't work. You know, it didn't make me as good as I thought it would. And so you start and your confidence starts to drop down until you reach a point where you're like, what do I even know about this game? You know, you learn a little bit more and you're like, what do I even know? You know, that was me when I first started coaching because I knew I had all this knowledge but I was putting it into practice with people. You know, I was trying to get their takeaways better, trying to get their grip stances and postures perfect and they were hitting it worse. And I was like, oh my God, this has completely shattered my illusion of how easy golf coaching would be. I thought it would just be swing by numbers and I just add these elements in this order to this player and they're going to play it better. And so yeah, you reach the valley of despair where you've learned a little bit more and you've seen a huge drop in confidence. And then over the years, you start the game more and more knowledge, maybe even more expertise, more experience, in my case, putting that into practice with pupils in my own game. And that chart starts to go up again. So you start to rise, you start to go through enlightenment and you eventually reach a new peak, but it's usually lower than that peak that the early person had. You know, the person who read one book and thinks they know it all. So you'll often have this expert who is aware that they don't know it all. Whereas you'll have a beginner who might think, I know a lot, I know everything about it. And so there's that confidence gap is a really weird paradox and an expert can be less confident than an amateur. Yeah. And I think, you know, as you're saying this, you know, knowledge and golf can be a tricky thing. So I think there's different buckets for this. So for example, if we talked about like, what's high value knowledge that can like directly influence scores immediately? And I would throw a strategy into there. I think once golfers learn optimal strategy, what we've discussed on the show, Mark Brody, Scott Fawcett, once you start understanding the basic rules and how scoring occurs, that's like a really quick win for most people. And they can put that into effect rather quickly with a little bit of discipline and patience on the golf course. So I find that type of knowledge more meaningful and that's why I love that stuff. But when you shift over to like, you're talking about like golf swing instruction, it's a whole different thing. Like if someone again read Hogan's book or any other of the million golf books on the swing and they're like, I got it, I figured this thing out, like this, this author just laid it out for me clearly, I could walk on the course now and do this. And that's where the disconnect, right? I often tell people like, I think for most golfers, the more you learn about the golf swing, again, for most, not all, I think the worse you can become. Like I think it's knowledge that isn't necessary. And that's why we have swing instructors to be like the translators in that journey. And of course, there's exceptions, but yeah, there's different buckets where it's like, you can learn something quickly and make it part of your game. And that's, that's a good thing. And then other parts where it's, I had a moment the other week where I was talking with a, with a buddy who's a really good wedge player and we were talking about my wedge struggles. There's this tendency for golfers who are good at something to think like, Oh, I'll help you with that. I'm a good wedge player. And he's like looking at my wedge and he's like, looking at myself, he's like, Oh, it's I'm like, dude, I know you mean well, but like, like I've spoken to Mayo. I mean, how many discussions have we had? I've had lessons at this point and I'll get there on my own terms. I have the knowledge, but I'm like, this is not like you looking at my wedge or telling me something. I'm like, we're way beyond that. And like I consider myself a very good driver of the golf ball. I can't translate that to someone else because I have too much respect for what it takes to be that level of instructor. So there's a lot of examples of this in golf and again, people mean well, I don't think anyone's doing anything wrong here, but you almost have to like take a step back and saying like, what's knowledge, what's wisdom, and also like what parts of the game. You don't really need to be an expert on a lot of things to get good at this game. I think you need to learn certain things and internalize them and compound that skill, but you do have to be careful with what you consume. And hopefully we're not wrecking anyone's golf games with these discussions. We try and keep it simple, but yeah, that the further I move along, like when I had that wedge discuss with my friend, I'm like, dude, I understand all of this theoretically, but when I stand over the golf ball, like I need to pass that test. That's a different test. And I need to come to terms to that on my own. That's not going to be like a quick conversation that fixes that. Yeah. What you're talking about there is both the Dunning Kruger effect, which your friend probably thinks he knows more about the game than he does. That also is a appeal to authority, a logical fallacy where because he's good at something, he thinks he might know a lot about it. Or sometimes people, you know, the cold authority is saying, oh, well, Trevino is a good wedge player. Trevino said this in a YouTube video, therefore it must be correct. There's also the procedural versus declarative knowledge part. So this is motor learning term, but procedural is your ability to do something, whereas declarative is your ability to explain it, maybe verbalize it and maybe teach it. So great examples of this would be, I mean, one that we can all relate to is we're all expert walkers, you know, we can all walk with pretty good mechanics. Oh man, I walk so much. I've been like logging like 13,000 steps every day. Let me tell you how I do it. I put one foot in front of the other. It's incredible. There's the thing. Yeah. But do you land on your heel first or do you land on your ball of your foot, which toes go in? Does your big toe stay up as you're walking or does your big toe stay down and stabilize as you're walking? When do you lift your big toe off? Where does your pressure? Does it go from heel to toe? Does it go from toe to heel? Do you swing your right arm with your left leg or do you swing your left arm with your left leg? It's like all these things. I mean, you can start to think about them, but we do them, but we don't think about them. So there's the procedural part is we probably all do very similar things with our walking. I know there are certain gate experts here who are saying, "Oh, people have bad walking." The, you know, your ability to explain what you do well, it can be very different. There are stories of people who have played great golf and then have been asked to write about what they do or ask to explain what they do. I mean, sometimes they ask pros on TV, right? They say, "Oh, can you give me us a little tip of how you, how you chip?" And then have you seen those ones with like, sometimes Tiger words, Rory McElroy talking together or-- Oh, yeah, I mean, we've talked about this before, like, no disrespect to pro golfers, but they might be some of the worst instructors ever. Yeah. I mean, Tiger's pretty knowledgeable on-- No, some of them are awesome. Yeah. Some of them are very good. It just doesn't mean because, again, because you got that good at it, like we've had Mike Kim on the show, I think he has a real talent for coaching and instruction. I see the stuff he's doing on Twitter. I can see someone like him if he decides to stop playing one day, like being an excellent teacher and coach. There's plenty of examples by that, but I think he might be an exception to the rule amongst PDA Tour and other professional golfers. Yeah. I've seen loads of videos where pros are asked to talk about their game and say, "Oh, how would you hit this chip?" And they have to stop and think about it, they have to say, "What do I do here?" I mean, they don't verbalize that. And then you can see them making it up on the spot, "Oh, I do this," and you're like, "You never do that. I've watched you a thousand times on the course. You never play that show." But yeah, so sometimes we can call to authority, and it's not exactly what they do or sometimes they get it wrong, right? I mean, you've got Faldo with the ball flight laws, you know, Faldo used to say, "Oh, you got to start." Or the ball starts where the club face is pointing, or you know, point the club face where you want the ball to finish and then point your feet where you want the ball to start. And he thought that was the, you know, the physics of impact. That might have been what he did from a procedural point of view, you know, from a declarative, from an ex-explanation part. But from a what he actually did point of view, no, we know the physics of it is very different. The ball starts more on the club face and curves away from the path. So yeah, there's so many examples of this. One good one that stuck out to me a lot is, you know, one of the best putters that I've ever seen when I asked him where he would start the ball. So I'd ask him, "Oh, give me a read for this one. You know, show me where you're going to start the ball." And you know, say, say a putt broke three foot. He would tell me it was only one foot of break. And then he stood in there and he made all these adjustments that he wasn't aware of and he would hold the putt. And I would say to him, so did that start on the line you want? And he's like, "Yeah, yeah, started a foot away." And I could see that no, he actually started it three foot away. And so this is where as a coach, you have to be very careful, right? This player is very, very good at the skill of putting, but they actually don't know what they're doing. You know, they're actually under reading it by three times or a third of the break. And so yeah, it could be tempting as a coach to say, "Oh, if I make this player have better knowledge, if I show them where the actual break is, they'll play better." But you could actually disrupt a lot of unconscious processes by doing that. You know, even the act of, I've been in lessons with people where people are hitting it relatively centered on the face. And then I say, "Right, we're just going to check the face strike and we spray the face." And all of a sudden they start hitting bad shots. It's nothing to do with, you know, we haven't changed anything. I just sprayed the face to check it and just the act of being aware of something can change these things. Sometimes adding more knowledge, even if it's good knowledge, doesn't always make a player better. And that's where, you know, the expert in me always has this slight dropping confidence from, I'm not like super, "This is guaranteed to work." I would never say that as a coach because I've just been through it so many times that we don't know how players are going to react to certain things. So, yeah, that's a Dunning-Kruger effect going off into lots of different logical fallacies there. Well, I mean, I think the, I mentioned Twitter is one of the perfect examples of what we're going to talk about. But the driving range too is that you could argue that your typical driving range is a perfect example of Dunning-Kruger is a lot of golfers who, meanwhile, Red Books watched YouTube videos, sharing stuff with one another, trying to help each other as friends being like, "Oh, change your grip here. I heard this." And like, this podcast told me to do this or maybe something they heard from us and they applied it improperly. And that's, I'd argue, like the game of golf is one big example of the Dunning-Kruger effect where we're all trying to help each other. And the gap, the gap of knowledge, what you really need, again, I try and be so humble to it of like what the golfer really needs. As you said, they might be doing something they're not aware of and the intention you give them is important versus like telling them X, Y, and Z because you heard this and it's just, it's, it's so hard. And that's why I often tell people like, you know, if your buddy's, you're at the golf course or you're at the range and you're struggling and your ears are open to everyone, close them down seriously. Like, it's not being rude. You could say like, oh yeah, nod your head, but I can't imagine many scenarios where you're using the wisdom of crowds and golf and getting better because there's really no wisdom in the crowd, in my opinion. Well, imagine someone just reads Hogan's book and Hogan talked about having a grip though is very weak. And that's because that, that's what worked for Hogan, you know, he's tend to suffer with hooks. And he found that we could hit it left, yeah, capping the wrist at the top worked. Now imagine that player, that, that player read that book goes off and sees Dustin Johnson, maybe as a child, you know, so Dustin Johnson's not on tour yet. And he says, oh, you need to change a grip. You can't go with that strong grip. Look, Hogan said this. So he changes the grip. Oh, you can't bow the wrist like that. Hogan said the cup it. And so now you completely ruin Dustin Johnson and his entire path because it doesn't match up. So yeah, be careful just because a book says something or you've learned something doesn't mean that's going to apply to everybody doesn't mean it's going to apply to you. And that goes into then the next kind of logical travel policy is the, the, the see it works coach or most of these come from watching my playing partners play because I tell them they're an endless source of content for me with all the stuff when I watching them figure out how to flag golf and they're all often teaching each other. And one of the ways that they'll do it and you'll see this on the range all the time is a player will go in and teach another player, they'll say, do this, try this. And that player will try it and they'll hit bad shot, bad shot, bad shot. And inevitably, if you hit enough shots, you're going to hit one good, right? And then when they hit it well, that player then said, the coach says, see, you did it that time. You did what I said that time. All the bad ones, obviously, no, you didn't do what I said then, but that good one, that's when you did it. And as a coach, I'll often look on that and I think they, that play did not do what you asked them to do that the good shot had nothing to do with what you were asking them to do. But both now player and coach believe that that's what caused the success. And in some cases, it can be harmless, you know, the player might tell them something that's not going to cause them detriment. But in many cases, what the players then trying can actually be harmful to them. You know, if an amateur coach, for example, has told a player to do X and it might be hurtful to them, say, say, for example, they told them to weaken their grip position. And this was Dustin Johnson, and now that might cause them a lot of harm in the future by doing that. So yeah, be very careful if someone is giving you coaching and they're not a professional. Be very careful that, you know, if you're hitting a lot of bad shots and then you hit one good one, it might not be what they've said that's caused that. You've seen any examples of that or been through any examples of that? Yeah, I mean, yes, I've seen it all the time. And you do it to yourself too, because you're constantly like searching, searching, searching. Like I remember one time when I was younger, I had this like epiphany, I'm like, I'm just going to like bash short pots and just like hit them really hard through the break. Because I had like one round where I did it, I'm like, Oh, this is how I do this. Okay, great. And then it just, you know, led to a ton of three putting and I've just had so many examples of that in my teenage years or younger years, and I try not to like, I like to tinker, but not too much. At this point, I'm not tinkering much, but I am like, quote unquote, a field player, but there's there's a limit to this stuff. And using these, I mentioned it earlier, these false positives. Sometimes you do find something like I found something 10 years ago with a stronger grip. And it's just one day I'm like, I'm going to try a stronger grip. I was like, what, and I was just compressing the ball better, like, and it has stuck with me. I have a strong grip now. But it took like over a period of months, I'm like validating it and seeing it the difference in my ball flight. And I think I just stumbled onto a good matchup for myself. But I paid attention to the proper feedback. And that's an example of it working, but I think there's a balance to it. And some golfers go overboard in the short term with seeing these false positives, just because as you said, like, there's a lot of volatility in this game. And eventually like, yeah, you will hit some good shots. And then you don't know if it was because of that one thing, but it has to play out over a longer period of time. And that's why we always talk about feedback is you have to be paying attention to the feedback always and not, not focusing on those two out of 10 shots that went well, like paying attention to the other ones as well. So yeah, you have to be aware of these false positives. We are going to take a quick break and we will be right back. Yeah. And what you said there about, you know, there's a lot of volatility in the game there. There is, I mean, there's waves of form you. It doesn't matter how good you are at this game. Like even our level will have days where, you know, what's your shot swing over the course of a year? What was your low round follow by your high round? Yeah, usually if I'm talking about recreational, I'm never going to shoot in the 80s in a recreational round anymore. I'm not going to shoot an 85. It just, it probably won't happen not to sound like unless I play like some crazy hard colors, but in a tournament. Yeah. Like, so if you consider my tournament recreational rounds, like I could go as low as the mid 60s and some years on like Bethpage black, I shot an 88 in a tournament. So yeah, it could be a pretty big swing. One recent one I was tweeting about the other day, not to, you know, she's the best golfer in the world right now amongst the women and certainly I'd say the men too. Nellie Corda, she won six out of seven tournaments. She's missed three cuts in a row and at the PGA championship, she was tied for second place entering the second round and she shot an 81. She was crying on the golf course. That's how hard it hit her. And this shows up at every level, obviously at her level, this is much harder, the scrutiny she's under and the skill she has and how good she's gotten. And then when you have that volatility, you're like, do you handle it calmly and just say, this is part of the game? Or do you say, whoa, something's really wrong here. Maybe I need to make a big change. And that's hard to know the answer and at that level, like that is the calculus that I've had to work with Mackenzie Hughes on. He's had those moments where he's like, do I change my swing? What do I do here? We had him on the podcast and he talked about that and he's not comfortable doing that. He thinks he has too much to lose. It's hard and it, the more golfers I talk to directly, like it plays itself out at every level of one shape or form. And it's very hard to manage. I don't think anyone ever solves this in this game. I really don't. I just kind of have to just deal with it and hopefully not be too volatile in response to it. Yeah. I think there are definite things you can do to taper the volatility. But ultimately it's always going to be there, even at our level, like you said, my best last year was, I think, seven under par and my worst was an 81 or 82, so about 10 over par. Yeah, I think that's, I think for a really good player, 15 to 20 shots is appropriate. You look at PGA tour scores, like, I think that's still a very good level for what I would call, quote unquote, elite level golfers, the top 1%. Yeah. So yeah, I would look more at your median round rather than your best rounds or your worst rounds. I think that's a better reflection of what you're doing and just understanding that form is very wavy and you're talking about Nelly Corda, you know, one of the things you have to do is when you're on the down part of that form is not always jump ship and try new things straight away because that might not be what you need, but on the other end of the scale, you know, you can have a player who has a few good rounds, maybe a couple of good rounds in a row, and then they say, I found it. All right. And that's part of the Dunning-Kruger effect as well is the people at the peak of, we call it Mount Stupid, but I don't like that term because it's not, it's not a lack of intelligence. Oh man, I've spent so much time on the top of Mount Stupid. It's not a lack of intelligence. It's just a lack of really experience and we, as experience golfers, we've been on the top of Mount Stupid so many times where we think that we found it and that we'll never lose it and then inevitably we do. And if that happens enough times, you start to realize, oh, maybe this isn't where it's cracked up to be. So I got a couple of guys I play with who are, they're going through good form at the moment and they think they've found it and they could be true. They, you know, they've found certain things are going to help them, but certainly there's also evidence that they haven't found it as well. They'll have a good nine holes and then throw a huge back line in where they look like they're old, they're old cells again. So yeah, being, being wary that when you are on good form, it might just be good form. It's not your new level, right? If you shoot your best round ever, that's not your new level now. That's not what you're going to go out and shoot every time. If you think that's the case, you're going to be severely disappointed and probably very upset with yourself and golf is going to be very painful for you for the next few weeks after a good round. That's why we often see someone fall from grace after some of their best rounds a week later. It's like, where did that golfer go? Yeah, it's just very much like the stock market. And often when we're playing well, we will try and seek, well, what am I doing differently this time? And again, there's lots of false positives there. It's like, oh, yeah, I'm just, you know, I'm just walking up and hitting it at the moment and I'm playing super well right now. Maybe that's the key. And you know, there may be something in that, but you can certainly just walk up and hit it and hit it awful as well. So it's not the secret. It's not the thing that is making you better necessarily. So be very wary what you attribute your success to. Where else we got, John here, I'm looking at one of yours, the thinking you need the perfect mindset to play good golf, which I think is a balanced one. So you make the point that you can hit a lot of great shots with the below average mindset. I, I fall on both sides of this thing. So I think, you know, we talk about a lot about mindset on this show. I think the more you can have consistency of inputs, you know, the better you can be overall handling like all the various outcomes. So I would tell someone that if you had a consistently like worried negative mindset over golf shots and while you're playing, I would say that's not a great way to play the game. I'm sure you can hit some good shots, but I think you're limiting your upside potential and you're just not enjoying yourself more. Whereas I don't think the opposite of that where you're saying, I'm going to step up to every single ball with complete confidence and an intention on my target and shot and feeling really good over the ball. And that's like the level I need to get to. And I don't think anyone ever gets to that level. I mean, I can't imagine even Scotty Scheffler walks up to every shot with 100% confidence. I'm sure he's pretty damn close to it or like more focused than many other golfers, but it's still not perfect, but he's obviously an extreme example. So there has to be some give and take and some leeway on this. And you know, what I ask of most golfers is is if they're serious about getting better at this game is aspiring to a little bit more consistency with your intentions and mindset versus like this haphazard approach, well, some shots, I'm going to pick a target, some shots, I'm going to have a swing thought, some shots, I'm just going to get up and hit it. Other shots, I'm going to spend 90 seconds over the golf ball. I can see that in certain players who are less experienced, like it's very haphazard what they're doing. If they're not playing well, then they rush and kind of go through the motions. Or if they are, they start playing too well, then they start waggling and thinking longer over the ball. So I still believe your while it doesn't guarantee a good result, aspiring to have the right type of consistency and intentions on the golf course with your mindset is important. And that could be as simple as like, Hey, I'm going to go out and join myself today and I'll let this game get me down too much. There's varying levels of this based on your commitment level. So like everything, there's a balance to this. But I'm of the mind that having the right intentions and consistency gives you a better chance and makes you're playing more enjoyable as well to the best of your ability. So many caveats there. Yeah. When I wrote that, you know, thinking you need a perfect mindset to play golf, I was thinking of when I used to look at Tiger Woods at his peak, and they used to talk about well, how mentally strong he was and what a machine he was. And you're just looking at him in his body language, and you think this guy is never thinking anything negative at all, he's got complete at a confidence in himself. And this stories of him throwing up before tournaments and, you know, getting very nervous and just because he doesn't show it on the outside doesn't mean he's not feeling it. And similarly with the tour players we've had on, they talk about how, you know, they do get nervous on the golf course sometimes and they do have negative thoughts and that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to play bad. Obviously as a balance here, you know, I'm going through some of the negative mindset with my putting right now, and that is definitely influencing my putting. I'm standing over shots and I'm not controlling the controllables. I'm not committing to one process that you talked about, but on the flip side of that, you know, I'm very good with my driver over the last five rounds or so. I think I've hit 85% fairways. And I've often stood there with a driver thinking, I have no idea where this is going to go. Oh, I hope this is going to go down the fairway or I make a swing and I'm like, Oh, God, that was scary, but it still goes down the fairway. So there's not always that direct correlation. As you said, there's a balance there, but don't go out thinking you need to be absolutely rock solid and completely positive and I make some horrible feeling back swings sometimes, you know, I'll take this club back and I'll think, where the hell is that club gone? There are multiple times just to show you like you cannot fully control your mind. I don't know how many times this happens to me around, but I notice it and I don't pay much attention to it. I know for a fact, my backswing gets long and I hinge too much at the top and there are certain shots. Maybe it's like an 80 yard wedge shot or whatever at the top of the swing. I'm like, whoa, that's long. And then that's just like something that went through my head during the, I don't know how long it takes to complete a golf swing, point three, four seconds, whatever it is. But that, and I can hit fine shots with that. It just kind of, there's certain things that rattle around in there that you can't control. And I think Jared Tenler brought this up on our episode probably last month at this point, but there is a way to confront some of this stuff off the course so that it doesn't show up on the course. So there are certain golfers that have very mismanaged expectations about scoring in general. Like, let's say someone who is of the mind that if I want to get down to a three handicap, I need to be making five birdies per round. And then that's like their standard. Me like, well, I got to go out there and like hit great shots, fire or pins. So they've set the table for themselves of a style of golf that they can never achieve. Therefore, on the course, how do they stand over the golf ball? How do they react to shots? It's all not going to work for them because they have the wrong idea of golf. And I did too for a very long time. I'm still working on it, but again, if you sat down off the course, hopefully if you read my book, you've read your book, whatever it is on practice and you have the right mindset going in, well, then those thoughts will not show up as much in the first place. So you can nip them in the bud before you even get to the course. But that doesn't mean they go away entirely. So there's definitely a balance to this because I know Jared didn't bring that up with that episode. And I thought it was a great point is like, you know, it was, it was the idea of letting negative thoughts happen, not fighting against them and redirecting your mind. And his point was, well, I think you can eliminate some of them in the first place by getting to the source of them off the course and really confronting that logically. And there's absolutely some truth to that as well. So that goes into like this overarching, like mindset on the golf course. If you're standing on the first tee, absolutely just in terror of what other golfers are thinking about you, you can get rid of some of that by doing some work and saying, like, what am I, what am I really valuing in this game? What do I care about? Am I thinking too much about what others think of me like you can get rid of a lot of that through some introspection or talking with someone else. So there is that side to it also of the work that goes on off the course to alleviate your mindset on the course. Yeah. It helped me to understand that, you know, with the driver pros are only hitting like 60% of the fairways that their shot patterns can be 60 yards wide, 30 yards left, 30 yards right. So that kind of freed me up to say, you know, well, maybe I'm not that bad a driver. And if I do hit a bad shot, even the best in the world do it, so it allowed me to make freer swings. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, thinking about the correlation of mindset and result, for me, it has the lowest correlation with my driver. I would say that the drives that I hit the worst are often the ones where I stand over them just with nothing but fit fairway in my mind. I'm just saying, I'm going to rip this down the fairway. And those are often the ones that I hit the worst, maybe because I try and do something different, maybe I try and hit it harder or something because I'm so confident. Whereas a lot of the ones where I'm feeling like, this is a tight all I got to steer it down there, those can be some of the ones that I get down the fairway. So it's very low correlated for me with with driver with padding. It's more highly correlated. I've got a negative mindset and negative outcomes, but that's, that's changing. Yeah. And that's part of the game where, you know, you've been posting publicly on like the types of practice you're doing and you're kind of letting it out. And I think this has been like a really good way of handling it. And you're probably going to figure out a way to in the near future, hopefully stand over a putt and not be so result oriented and just let it happen because obviously you had this video where you, how many 12 footers you made in a row, like obviously it's not a technique issue. It's more of like some other stuff going on. But yeah, that's, there's no right answers to this and everyone needs to go back to their rounds and think about this stuff. And what do you think gives you the best result? I think for some players, it's disassociating themselves from the results or as best they can can help free them up to be more athletic and instinctual versus thinking like, well, I need to make this putt, I need to hit this fairway versus that's my target. There's my routine go, except the results move on to the next one and then just deal with whatever crazy crap goes through your head in between and hopefully remove some of that crazy crap in between rounds. I think that where the whole mindset thing gets me is when I see a player who has say a chronic issue, so say they're shanking it every single time and they just say, I just need to be more confident in that kind of situation, it's like, nah, you need to be better. You need to fix the issue. Yes. Absolutely. I think our underlying skill sets the table and then the rest of it brings it out. And I think in your instance, because you do have incredible skill, that can overcome you having these bad thoughts about your driver and you can still stripe it down the middle because you're just very skillful and technically sound, you can get away with that stuff. But if you said to a beginner like, oh, don't worry about what happens, just have a great mindset, that's not going to be enough because there's a skill deficit there and they need to get better. It's both and if I had to assign values to them, the skill and the technique and the physical far outweighs the mindset stuff, the mindset sharpens it up, but this is a game of skill. That's why we talk about how you practice and all that stuff so much because that is what gives you the biggest potential. Yeah, I know that I often find myself on both sides of the debate, you know, there's some coaches who say, ah, don't worry about confidence. If you just get better, your confidence will improve and that has an element of truth to it. But we can't deny that say you're standing over a shot and you're fearful of the water on the left and then you end up flaring it right, that's not a technical issue. That was a mental issue. So you can't deny it both both sides have good points to be made and there's that balance in between. There's that sweet spot we talk about. So on the topic of, you know, you saw that video of me doing the putting blocked practice, the next one I would say is mistaking performance for learning. So performance is like how well you do it a task, how well you perform. So, you know, in that blocked practice putting exercise, I hit 238 out of 240 putts hit my target. That's insane. I didn't think I would get that. Yeah. But that's ridiculous. There's 99.17% or something. It's from six feet. It wasn't the 12. 12. Yeah, I think I've done a few winters ago. I had that perfect practice mat I was working on. And yeah, I think I hit like 60 or 70 in a row from like five. You're just like going, going, going. It's just like you're not even thinking anymore. Yeah. I think I got 142 in a row and I had to stop at the end because my back was hurting. So it would have been interesting to see how it got. But, you know, my putting is poor, very poor from that range. You know, I lose 1.6 shots around or I have done from just the three to six foot range alone. So I'm awful at that yet in that block practice scenario, I was able to perform to super elite level. And so yeah, performance is how well you do at a task, but learning is how much of it do you retain? So say, for example, you're learning a new task and you get it to the point in the session where you get it up to 90% success rate. Well, that's performing. Training is what about when you come back three, five days, a week later, how much of it did you retain? If you go straight back to where you were and it was like all of the session that you did has lost, then there's no real learning going on. You're just performing well in the session, in the practice session, but you're not learning a lot. You're not retaining a lot. And you kind of see this in the studies of blocked practice versus random practice is that blocked practice and for people listening who don't know that block practice is where you do the same thing over and over and over. What happens in those sessions is your performance increases during that session. You go, you might go from 10% success rate to 80% success rate. Whereas random practice, you don't see the gain in performance during the session. So you would look at it from the outset from that session and you'd say, oh, block practice is doing better because the performance is improving. However, when you come back three days, five days, a week later and then you do the same thing, what's interesting is the block practice lose almost all of their performance gains and they're back to the start again, back where they were, whereas the random practice start from a new higher level. So if you look at it over the course of time, the random practices maintain or retain more of the performance gains from the practice sessions. And then there's also the issue of transference. So performance is what you're doing in the session. Learning is how much you retain of that. Transference is then, can you put that new learning into your desired environment? In other words, can you take what you've learned on the range and put it under the golf course and retain it? And again, in the studies at least, blocked practices shown to tend to have lower retention of learning and transference, whereas random practice tends to transfer to the environment, to the golf course much better as well. So don't be fooled by your in practice gains is what I'm saying. Yeah, I was, I was talking with the player who had a really good putting session. He spent two hours on a Saturday and then played the next day. And he said, it arraigned and the speeds of the greens are a little bit different on my course. And he's like, I missed everything and it absolutely killed me. And I said, well, you know, first of all, let's think about putting for a second. It's probably the most volatile part of a volatile game. Secondly, if you spent two hours putting, I don't know how many balls you saw go in the hole, probably an incredible amount. So when he missed those first few five or six, seven footers, it was what the hell? I just spent all that time yesterday working here. And the ball's not going in the hole. This is frustrating. And I'm like, of course, yeah, it is frustrating. It sucks. Go on a PGA tour green, like LPG, like they are literally pouring it in in random format. They'll go around a circle, bunch of eight footers, like 40 footers. It's crazy. They go on the course 50% from eight feet. Yeah. It's all about expectation management. I actually wrote about it in the, in the practice manual. I wrote about how if you're practicing in a way that raises your expectations, that can actually do you harm. Oh, for me now, I've had 99.17% success rate from six foot. What do you think I'm going to be thinking next? I'm going to go on the golf course from six foot. What do you think it was going to happen when I missed two six footers? I'm going to be super upset and you know, I'm dealing with the same thing you are with my wedges and, you know, we're going to keep talking about this because we can't stop. And I was at the short game facility the other day, just like, I'm like, savvy, literally opening the face, like one stop hop, like I'm doing it all. And I thought about it, I'm like, you know what, this is nice in the sense that I don't expect to go on the golf course and do this, but at least I'm proving to myself, I can do it. This is my takeaway and I'm trying to be healthy about this is that like, it's, this isn't some loss cause like I'm capable of doing it. It's just a matter of like bridging that gap and I'm trying to be very patient with it. And that's, that's the hardest thing. If you are someone who does practice a lot and you're willing to put in the time, that is the hardest thing to do is, and we talk about this on a few episodes recently is like that, that gap of expectation and knowing that when you're in the game, whether that's a recreational round or a tournament round, whatever the case, and you've got that one chance on the greens or with the wedge shot or with the drive, you have to be prepared not to be able to hit it the way you are in practice and be okay with that and understand this is part of the process of getting better. You're still going to thin some wedges. You're still going to yank some puts to the left, you're still going to top some drives. But our goal, our collective goal is to make it happen less often. And if you have this binary expectation of eliminated gone forever, never going to work for you. It's just not how this game works. And I'm like, I'm still trying to figure this out, obviously myself. Yeah, I try and use practice, different forms of practice and the way to manipulate confidence and expectation levels as well. So yeah, if I have a player who is low confidence, then block practice can be kind of valuable to build that confidence like you found, you know, you're feeling as if, oh, I can actually do this that when you're doing the wedges on the, on the range. It's in the realm of possibility. It's there somewhere. Exactly. And that block practice session I did with my putting at least told me that, okay, I can kind of eliminate the variable of starting the ball online now as the issue. I know that I can start the ball online because I just proved to myself that I can do it. But I don't want to stay block practicing to the point where I start to get frustrated when I miss a six footer on the course. So the other end of the spectrum then is it is when you find your confidence is getting too high. This is actually quite common for golfers. I see all the time I play in partners practice on the range block practice. They end up going on the golf course and they say on the first, oh, it's hitting a great on the range and I'm thinking, yeah, you're hitting a great block practice, which is easy. Just wait until you're on the course and what happens? They flare their first one out right and they think where did all of that training go on the range. So manipulating the difficulty of your training to make things more realistic, to manage your expectations. If you find you're expecting good things, you need to make your practice harder, even harder than real life. If you want to. There are ways of doing that. There's ways of going out on the golf course and saying we used to set up challenges where we'd go on the golf course with practice rounds and we'd call it impossigolf. So basically any rough is treated as a water hazard. And you had to drop it back or sometimes we would play US open rules where if you hit in the rough, you have to hit a sandwich out for the next shot, even if it's low rough and you can get a seven nine on it, nope, you have to hit a sandwich out. These are the rules. When you hit your approach onto the green, you have to drop it 10 paces directly away from the flag. So that was a good drill to actually show people how to not short side yourself. Because imagine if you hit it five foot away from the flag and you're on the short side of the flag, you're now going to be dropping it into a bunker somewhere. Whereas if you hit it five foot on the right side of the flag on the fat part of the green, you'd be dropping at least onto either a long putt or a nice chip, you'd have a lot of green to work with. So that would basically that game was making the game much more difficult to the point where people would score much higher, but it would lower their expectations. And then when you take those constraints away and you say, well, hey, that rough is okay now. It's not a water hazard. It actually gives people confidence. Tiger, one example that he always would play worst ball leading up to a tournament. So he hit two balls off every shot and take the worst one. Yeah. So the opposite of what you'd want to do because everyone knows the second golfer is usually better. But again, like that's a good example of that too, is increasing the challenge. Yeah. Yeah. Doing both of those, you know, worst ball is great for managing expectations and best ball is great for confidence building. You know, Bryce and went off the red teas when he shot at that 50 now. Yeah. The opposite example of that is like the confidence boosting stuff where maybe you need the opposite of what we just discussed and saying like, I need a little refresher here to make myself feel better about my game. So yeah, I've seen some courses on certain weekends, they'll play like a very short set of teas for people just for fun. There's many ways you can turn the volume up or down on the difficulty level. We always seem to get back to this. And it's like, it's just the thing that never ends in this game is that what you're capable of and what you do and how you handle that because again, Nellie quarter shot in 81 the other day, you think she knows she's better than that? She's like, I just want six tournaments. I just want six tournaments. And I just totally lost it here. Yeah. Hopefully she's got the right. Well, she will have the right people in it. She will. Yeah, she'll. She will absolutely rebound from it and figure it out because she's that good, but it's just, I don't say that to like, I hate trying to make an example out of a golfer and I've had moments too, like where I've had just embarrassing tournaments or I'm just like, what the sucks? And then you, you kind of use that as a nice humbling thing and you, if you have the right healthy reaction to these things, they can be good for you. And if you fight against it, if you just keep saying, well, that golfer on the course can never live up to that one on the range or the other one who shot that personal best six months ago, you're like chasing a ghost. You're trying to find something that doesn't exist and you'll never be happy with that. We are going to take a quick break and we will be right back. This episode is brought to you by Maui Nui venison, a mission based food company bringing the healthiest red meat on the planet directly to your door. My wife and I have been absolutely obsessed with their products the last few months, cooking with their meat and eating their jerky. Also, Maui Nui has a very special operation going on and it is the only stress free 100% wild harvested red meat on the market. And most importantly, it's seriously delicious and easy to cook. 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Once again, that's MauiNuiVennison.com/Golf or use the coupon code Golf to get 20% off your first order. Yeah, it's going to be interesting. One of my friends shot one of his best rounds of his life the other day. In fact, positive for me, I had to hold a six foot putt so that we didn't tie. And he's a 15 handicap. I hold it. So that's actually a positive for me. There you go. I've got a couple of those memories now. There's two. Did you fist bump? I did. Yeah, I went mental on it. Yeah, I was whooping, holler and yeah, it was seriously good. I think that's awesome. Well, you got to like imprint that in you. It was only joking, obviously, but it was internally it was like, yeah, that's actually the second time that I've hold a six foot putt now. But, you know, he was a 15 handicap. So I think I shot one over par and I had a bad putting day all day, but I managed to hold that last one and he had a great round, but he had one of those rounds where he was rattling them in from 20 foot, 30 foot, 40 foot, you know, the stuff that's not repeatable. And anytime he hit a bad drive, it would be on the opposite fairway with a wide open shot to the green. So again, it's one of those things that's not really repeatable and he ended up shooting a really good score. And I know that this is going to be a tough next few weeks for him because he's going to expect to do that and it's just what he did in that round is just not the possibilities of doing that over and over, just like, you know, speed, what he did with those putts. It kind of goes back to I try and keep things we're revering way off topic here, but who cares? When you talk about that, the volatility and what you can expect of your game, like I often tell people like the simple thing is if you build your game around hitting more greens and working backwards, like that's, that's how you shoot a lot of those boring, like, good numbers. And I've been coaching a couple of really good high school players who are starting to become really good tournament players. And they've worked their butts off on ball striking and it's starting to pay off for them. And it's that style of play. If you want to get really good at this game and you shoot some personal best when your putter gets hot, but the ball striking was like, yeah, it was fun, like nothing special, but I hit the ball well, I kept it and play off the tee and hit some decent iron shots. I just made a bunch of putts today versus, oh man, I got up and down from everywhere like I get arguments all the time with this on Twitter and I've been on both sides of this when I first started my website, I used to talk about all the time how I read Ratella's book on the short game. And I was like, yeah, wedge is imputting that that that's the great equalizer that saves everything. Man, was I wrong because I've been on both sides of this now and I've seen it with many other players. The sustainable long term gains in handicap reductions and scoring abilities. And that goes with your personal best and we've had Brodion like the stats are there. It is ball striking, like you can argue all you want against it and people will continue to do so. But, you know, if you shoot that like miracle round, re-drained a bunch of putts and you were all over the place off the tee with your irons and you just kind of pieced it together with like crazy wedge shots around the green and putting like it's not repeatable. I'm sorry to burst people's bubbles. It's just not. Possibilities are not the probabilities rather are not there for you. If you're if you're holding 30 foot putts, it's just not going to happen from round around because even the pros whole what three, five percent of 30 footers, something like that. Yeah, you can't show up expecting hot putting and like saving a ton of cars from eight to 10 feet range or wedging it close enough from three feet. Like it's the boring tee shots that you hit in the light rough with a clear path to the green and you hit seven, eight, nine greens as your baseline. That's how you build towards shooting a lot of personal bests and big handicap productions. It's just the game's too hard not to do it that way and it takes more work. But again, if you don't have the time for that and stuff like that, you have to be a piece with that as well. I'm a perfect example of what you're talking about because, you know, tangent the app I use for the stats, they have handicap level in each category. So you can look and say, well, what handicap am I playing to when driving an irons in short game? And so my driving is a plus four point six or something like that. My iron play is about the same. My short game, not that I use it much is about a plus five point four, I think, something like that. But my putting, I'm the equivalent of a 13 handicap. So there's a very big disparity between the levels, yet I still go out and my scoring wise, it puts me as a plus one handicap. So even though my putting is at the 13 handicap level, I can still score to a plus one because the long game is pretty solid. So yeah, I would, I would take my position any day over the player who is scrambling to get to these scores, definitely as frustrating as it is not to not be able to ever convert a part. And that has its own downsides too. But if you're priority shooting the lowest score as possible, like that's how you have to build your game. It's just again, there is exceptions and I've seen players who have the incredible short games that show up all the time. I've seen very few of them though, like I'd much rather be the boring like golfer who can hit it like two, yeah, again, for a male golfer, like 230ish streetish and decent iron play or the equivalent for female golfer, like that's how you make the game much easier on yourself. And speaking speaking about the simplest answer, I know you talked about greens and regulation and working back, that leads on to Occam's razor, the idea that the simplest answer is often the right one. That always makes me think of the movie contact. Would you be faster? Right. Yeah. I love that feeling. It's so slow. So, so slow building. Yeah, there's there's points in that movie where it's like googling that right now. So, yeah, Occam's razor is the idea that- Yes, all right, I just, I just sorry, I'm going to cut you out. I just wanted to confirm that it was part of that movie because it's one of my favorites ever. I know it's based on the Carl Sagan book, but one of my favorite like childhood movies, but yes, that is from that movie. I'm not remembering it improperly. Well, most golfers, they kind of get caught into this trap of complexity and I think that stems from the fact that when something is difficult, we often think that a more complex answer is the right one. People listening to our podcast will know that we often boil things down into simplicity. Our big three is a very, very simple way of looking at golf, but very, very functional. And so, you know, it's the simplest answer, our big three is often the right one. It's, it's very difficult to do that when I see golfers all the time. Sometimes again, it goes with that done in Kruger effect where people, if they have enough knowledge to be dangerous, a little bit of knowledge, they often look down on that simple stuff and they think, I, cause I've been there, right? I've been the player who knows enough about golf to be dangerous, looking down on people talking about things like X, Y and Z and then thinking, that's just too simple. That's not, that's not mechanical enough for me. And then years and years later and many thousands of books later and many thousands of hours of lessons later, I'm actually at the point where, oh, you know what? That simple stuff was actually right. And that goes to the, what was the Einstein quote is something like, if, if you can understand it really well, then you can explain it simply, something along those lines. I think that, you know, that's been true of my coaching as well. I do love the complexity. I do love talking about it definitely, but when I'm coaching, when I'm training people, it's often just, ah, just do this task. Just feels if you brush the ground here instead of here or just feels if you present the face a little bit more open, it can often go to really simple things. Yeah, I mean, obviously I'm going to agree with you, but it, the one thing about golf that it definitely can lead you down this path is as you get better, you think you need more tools or shots or options at your disposal, and I've found quite the opposite. So the way I like to think about it is you can get complex off the course when you need to, and that can be at times of swing instruction. It can be at times with even understanding strategy and all this other stuff. Like you can think very deeply about these things off the course, but the goal is that when you're on the course, things get simpler. Like, if you ask me how did I get better at this game, it's like I made it easier on myself, and this goes for everyone. I hope I'm not being obnoxious with too many references to having an insight to a PGA tour player, but I think this is helpful for people to understand like a dude who's making millions of dollars playing pro golf said to me the other day, he's like, I had this situation on a green where I was just like, I could hit a chippy nine iron to the back, it was narrow. I was like, why am I making this so hard on myself? I could just hit the hard pitching wedge, and I know I'm not going to get myself with the trouble. It's a hard par four, and best case scenario, I give myself a 2015 footer for birdie that maybe I'll make, but I'm just going to two putt and get out of there and then make hay on the on the holes I know I can, and this is not one of them, and this is a guy who's been playing professionally for a long time saying like, man, if I just take the easy way out and make it simple on myself, I know I can shoot some really good scores on that day. I think he shot six under and it, you know, that learning never stops and that fighting for simplicity never stops, but like, I, I believe it very deeply that that's the way to go for almost everyone. You do not want to walk up to your shot thinking about 16 different things while I could do this and my spin loft, I got to keep it down and the target, it's overload. This is an athletic game. It's a natural game. So you want to play like you're reacting to the target. And the only way to do that is to understand things at a deeper level, I believe off the course and learn it, but not like I still think people do that and they're like, great, I'll bring that on the course just the same. And that doesn't work either. It's just too much overload because in the moment, you're going to be distracted by a lot of other things, playing partners, your score, the wind, the undulation and the course. And there's such an assault on your brain that if you don't have these simple things to fall back on, it's going to be too much to initiate the swing and execute to your potential. Yeah. If I went back in time and I taught myself say 20 years ago when I was learning the game, I would have thought I was mad as an instructor now, like if I said to myself, oh, all you need to do is just try and hit the ground a little bit farther forward. So just try and hit out the opposite part of the face as a 20 year old who had all this information in my head about mechanics, I would have thought, what is that guy going on about? He's that's way too simple. I know way more than him. I know I know more about swing mechanics. I'm going to find out the right way to swing it and do it. When I think about how I used to play then versus what I think about now, it's so simple how I play now. I'm literally just, if I'm hitting the toe one day, I'll just try and hit out of the heel a little bit more. If the ball is going a little left, I just flash the face open before I make my swing, before I grip it. If I'm hitting it fat one day, I just try and hit the ground farther forwards or try and pick it off the turf until it's right. Every simple stuff, basically the golden rule, take the fault and try the opposite. Yeah, it's a mix of Dunning Kruger and Occam's Razor there. But yeah, definitely. I think keeping things simple on the golf course and even now what you talked about, I can be quite mechanical when I'm practicing in my little lab here, you know, our stick hack motion on and I love looking at the data, looking at the wrist angles and things like that. If I look at my quad data or I'll be thinking about my hand path or something like that, yeah, I get deep into that here, point him on the golf course, I might just be thinking about brushing the grass. And that is sometimes I will be honest as an instructor, that is sometimes a mistake that I make when coaching people is I forget to tell them, no, this is just a drill. This is what you're doing practice. No, of course you don't go on the course with that because sometimes I'll get a message, oh, I was trying to do on the course today and it was okay. But I was like, whoa, so you taking that on the course with you? No, no, no, you want to be thinking of simple stuff out there. It never gets old and it never, like you never need this reminder, like even myself, like going on the course with approach shots, I've found myself at times getting maybe a few moments where I'm not as disciplined with the target and I'm like, oh, I could play this shot in there and get cute with it. Kind of talking about the example I said earlier about taking the easy way out. And like, I just, I don't care how much you learn or you know, like you do need to remind yourself and catch yourself in these situations when you review your rounds, where you're saying, like, what's that making the game too hard on myself and too complicated today? And why now if it, if your mind was clouded because you weren't swinging well, and there are some issues in your golf swing and ball flight that are really plaguing your game, then yes, that might require off the course, like looking under the hood of the car a bit and getting more complex with the goal, as you said, like the disclaimer of hopefully getting back to simplicity on the course, it's super hard to do to play that way. You are making the game very hard on yourself and it's a struggle at times to play that way. I don't ever want to give the impression that the game is always simple for me. It's not like I would say this season, it's been very back and forth for me where I'm feeling like, Oh, I am complicating things because I'm struggling in some rounds and other rounds I feel good over the ball. I'm working on this myself. And again, my north star, as we're talking about Occam's Razor is I got to get to the simplest answer is the right one. I'm fighting for that, no matter what. I'm not fighting to go on the golf course and think about three checkpoints and my chipping motion or, you know, over analyzing a put and thinking about how if I make this, it'll keep my round going or all the other thoughts that go in your head, I'm just trying to drown all that out and get into that state where I'm just like, focused over the ball, have my little bubble I get into execute, and then I spend the next three or four minutes in between shots, talking to people, doing whatever to distract my mind. I'm not going there in between. Yeah, as an instructor, I always try and start out with the simplest stuff, especially in a live lesson, I will start out with the most basic, simple concept that I could explain to a six year old and see how that performs. And if it performs well, I'm like, this is all you need to know. Yeah, exactly. Why go for it? And some people want that. They're like, no, no, no, give me more. I'm sure. And it's like, no, we're good here. If you're good, I'm good. Yeah, sometimes I have to, you know, bite my tongue and stop myself doing that because I love talking about the theory of things as well. And so, you know, I can sometimes add some stuff and I'll catch myself and say, you know what, you don't need to know that part. All you need to know is this part. Now obviously, if it's not working, if the simple part isn't working, then we may layer on a little bit more complexity because as an instructor, you're battling a little bit what a person needs, but as well what they want. And you know, they are the, they are the customer. So if they ask me, well, what about this? What about this? Sometimes have to go down that row, but I'm always trying to say, look, without being big-headed, I'll say, like, I know a lot about this game. I could talk about forces, talks, kinetics, kinematics with you. But honestly, you need to think like this. You need to think of the simple stuff. And you know, I sometimes battle with this as well with my writing is that I'm trying often to capture, I'm trying to write to myself as a 20-year-old. And I know if I wrote an article saying just brush the ground here and that's all you need to think, as a 20-year-old, I would read that and just throw it in the bin and never go back to that website again. But if I write about, well, hear all the things that contribute to hitting the ground in the right place, and then at the end of the article, I say, but, you know, this is not how you should be thinking about it. There are actually simpler solutions. So I actually did an article on shanks on the shanks and I talked about how I did a video where I hit one on the heel and I hit one on the toe and then I did a deep analysis of the mechanical differences between them and they were microscopic, really. And at the end of that article, I said, look, I wasn't thinking about any of that when I was hitting the shot, all I was thinking about was hitting a different part of the face and my movement responded as a result to that. And that is actually how I prefer to train people. Yeah. I think that's fair. Like even with the ground contact, you've done a really good job of showing visuals of concepts like arc depth and low point control and how they're different and they work differently for how the club interacts with the turf before or after it hits the ball. I think people seeing that stuff like, Oh, okay, that makes sense. And then you say, all right, but this is why we still want you to focus on bottoming out the club here. They work together. And yeah, I think sometimes you want to know the why. Like for example, with me, with the driver, I didn't fully understand like angle of attack and how it relates with swing path and stuff like that when I was messing around with my Sky track for years, I was just trying to remove curvature excess curvature right to left on my driver. And I happened to just stumble across like, well, if I seem to swing more up or have that intention increased my launch angle, that was the only metric I could track. I didn't have angle of attack on the Sky track. And the ball seems to be going straighter and farther. That's interesting. And I could see it. I could measure it. And then I've come to understand after having discussions with you, we're like, Oh, that that happens to be a good matchup for me. The more I swung up, the less I was swinging into out. And now it's like pretty much zero, I've almost zero out my swing path by trying to swing up and it's just really a battle of face control now. But that was a simple journey. I'm not totally interested in all of that stuff. I understand it a little bit. I'd say I have moderate expertise in that, but not nearly as much as someone like you because I don't have to teach it to someone, not a swing instructor. But that benefited me as a player keeping like, maybe it's like the right level of willful ignorance where you know enough as to why, but it's not so much that you don't go out on the golf course thinking like, Oh boy, I need all this stuff to go right to get the ball straight. It's still more like my cues like, I was going to swing up on it. And most days, like that's a good cue for me. Maybe sometimes I need to close the face up with the face. Everyone's different, right? I have people who need to know the reasons behind one of those people, you know, if I have a lesson and someone tells me to do something, I'll say, okay, even if it works, I'm like, I want to know why I want to know why it works. I just need my brain just works that way. And that's why I write the way I do. That's why I write my articles, the way I do. They may be a little bit more complex than I actually teach, but sometimes I'll have someone come in for a lesson and they'll say, Oh, I read this article about yours. I'm like, no, no, no, you don't, you don't need to be thinking about that. Stick to the simple stuff that we did. So yeah, it's a balance to get, but I'm also trying to reach a lot of people. And there's a lot of people out there who believe in the complex, you know, they believe that this game is so difficult, they must be complex answers. You kind of have to reel them in a little bit with at least showing that you understand the complexity. And if I can show them that and they can read an article and say, Oh, this guy knows his stuff. He knows his geometry, his forces, his talks, this and that. And then if I then say, you need to do this simple thing, there's more likely to be trust in that because at least I would have as a 20 year old, I'd be like, Oh, this guy knows his stuff and he's telling me to do something simple. I'm going to listen to that rather than someone who just tells you to do something simple and they won't tell you why. Yeah, it's, it's the proper blend. And I think there's probably been more of a trend in the last decade in coaching to kind of show off with some of these concepts for people. And even in the lesson, and then it's like players are just inundated with all this technical info. And I think the best instructors have the confidence to do both where it's saying like, I'll explain this to you, but like our intent's going to be simple. Like I'll show you behind the curtain a bit, but we're going to keep you in front of the curtain most of the time despite you really wanting to go back there. I'll give you a peek, but we're not going to stay back there. I think a lot of the top swing instructors share that, that they don't go overboard. Because as you said, the Einstein quote is like they understand something so intimately well in an advanced level and they can go there with people. But at the same time, the harder skill is to distill it into something simple and a simple one or two intentions to the player and it knowing that it will accomplish all of that advanced stuff that they're looking behind the curtain. And I think that was probably like the biggest challenge when Trackman first came out because everyone's like, whoa, there's 40 different parameters and like you want to do your spin loft in this and the players are like, what, what are you talking about? And I'm sure that that's gotten way better as the level of education has gotten better over the last 10 years as well. We could talk a little and this one will be like five minutes on superstition again relates to a lot of what we've said, but when something is very complex and especially when rewards are random. This has been shown in animals. So if you look at the Skinner box pigeon experiments, they gave pigeons random rewards. So every 10 or 20 seconds or something was obviously just different intervals, a little food pellet would come out and they left these pigeons in boxes and came back after a few hours and the pigeons had all these different ticks. They were spinning round in circles pecking three times, but they were very definite. You know, this pigeon was doing three taps, spin around twice three taps and you think, how did that develop and they go back through all the footage and they see that, you know, the pigeon tapped three times on the box and a pellet came out. So he tries again, right? Tap three time, nothing comes out. Tap three time spins around a pellet comes out. So he's linking up these things again, false attribution. It had nothing to do with what he was doing, what the pigeon was doing, but they starts to condition the pigeon and the same has been shown with humans as well. Aaron Brown, a famous British mentalist, he locked some people in a room and they were different objects in the room. They were bean bags everywhere. They were colored spots on the floor. They were little objects you could play with and there was a counter at the top of the door and the counter said, once this reaches a hundred, you will be let out of the room and they're trying the door and they're like, we're locked inside. And then someone picks up a bean bag and the counter goes up one and they're like, wait, what happened? I picked up this bean bag and the counter went up, so they do it again. And the counter goes up again. They come back an hour later and they get let out of the room, they reach their points and they're interviewed. They said, so what were the rules of the game? And every single one of them had very definite rules. They said, oh, yeah, you needed to pick the bean bag up three times. She needed to spin around in that corner and this person needed to tap the object three times. And that's the rule. That's how you get the points. Now the actual reality was in another room, there was a goldfish in an aquarium and there's a line down the middle of the aquarium. Anytime the goldfish swam across the line, the point went up. It had nothing to do with what they were doing. Yeah, they all would very definite. These are the rules of the game now. How does this crazy discussion relate to golf? Well, if you were a golfer on the range and you make a swing and you hit a bad shot, bad shot, then all of a sudden you get a random reward, a good shot. Immediately our brains, because we are pigeons, basically, we will go to what did I do in that? And then all of a sudden, you know, you start to get in all these different ticks and these random superstitions. That's why if you ever see a player who's got these really silly waggles and you think, where the hell did that come from? You know, why is that player doing that? They're lifting their foot up, they're doing this with their shoulder, they're pulling the shirt in, you know, it's superstition that's been developed by all that false attribution. And so we got to be very careful with this because, you know, pulling on your shirt from under your arm is one thing, right? That's pretty harmless. But if you think that a backswing move created your good shot, you know, maybe sucking the club way inside or taking it way inside or doing something even more harmful, it created your good shot. And actually started to get into severely bad habits that cost you long term just by making that false attribution. Reminds me of one of my favorite books, fooled by randomness, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, I believe is the author. He's written some other books too, but it was kind of, I don't remember all of it. It was 20 years ago. I read it maybe a little less, but just saying like, you know, in the stock market, his thought was you have all these like expert stock pickers that he like, oh, for 30 years, they beat the S&P. And it's like, well, if we started with a thousand people and you followed them over 20, 30 years, quote unquote experts, eventually you're going to hit someone who called the heads or tails right 50 times in a row. Only the one out of the thousand, the rest of them. It's like, is that person really an expert or did they just get lucky? You know, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to really piss off all the finance people who fashioned themselves as stock pickers, but I thought that was a fascinating read. And, you know, there's all that data on hedge funds and outperforming the market and you got to pick the right hedge fund, hopefully I have friends in hedge funds. So I say this out of respect to them. Yeah, there's a lot of things in life where we kind of, you know, take a lot of shots in the dark, so to speak. And you can get, as I said earlier, those false positives and in golf, it's hard to know the difference between the right ones and the wrong ones. There's a survivorship bias of logical fallacy as well. Like if you get a million people all playing the stock market, one of them is going to be Warren Buffett, but even Warren Buffett is intelligent enough to say that he got lucky. He did certain things at certain times that not repeatable now. And he was also just in the right place, right time. And if he had to do it all again, he probably wouldn't be as successful as he is now. I think he's even said he's definitely wouldn't and he's encouraged his, his spouse to put everything in the S&P 500 when he, he dies to just not have to worry about stock picking. You could say that about professional golfers at the top. Is that survivorship bias? Like, is, are the things they're, some of the things they're doing? I don't know, technically probably not because they're all doing certain things around impact, but like just, you know, certain mantras or ways they play the game, you're looking at someone always looks at their, oh, he's pro, they're practicing that way on the range. That's the way to do it. It's like, well, you're looking at a finished product. Like, how are they practicing 25 years ago as a kid? I don't know. So they're, I've seen some interesting stuff there as well. The one I think of when I think of survivorship bias with professional golfers is the pro golfers who make a swing overhaul, all right. And then so say, say for example, players struggling with their swing, they overhaul their swing, say a Nick Fallow, for example, although he wasn't struggling, but, and then they go on and they win a bunch of majors or they win a tournament and then they held up as, oh, look, this swing overhaul is what created it. And again, there might be elements of truth to that, but the survivorship bias part is for every hundred golfers, hundred pro golfers who make a complete swing overhaul, maybe a best 50% improve, but you don't hear about the ones who fall off. You don't hear about the ones who are now selling cars for a living and have lost their ability to play the game. So, you know, there's, yeah, there's big survivorship bias in, in that regard, I think. But we can, we can go more through that kind of stuff in our next episode, John. All right. Well, hopefully you got your brains rattling around a bit on this one thinking differently. You can find me and my work at fourfoundationsofgolf.com or always chat with me on Twitter at practical golf and work in everyone find you Adam. Go to adamyoungolf.com, some of the things that we, we talked about in this episode or in the book, the practice manual. And if you really into this kind of stuff, then next level golf would be a program. We've got hundreds of hours of content in their systems, helping you become a better critical thinker, better coach, deeper understanding of everything. So you can guard yourself against these kind of logical mind traps. Yes. And thanks for everyone's feedback, their attention listening to the episode, these mind vendors and we'll see you, I think we'll do part two on this after this. Maybe it'll wait a few episodes. We'll see. I can't peer into the future, but I think we'll continue this discussion. So we'll see you eventually for part two. Thank you for listening.
