THE STORYLINE OF OUR LIVES

Attention to the Detail

Not long ago I was watching a golf tournament on television, and I noticed something I had never really noticed before. I watched the player who was leading the tournament while he was preparing to take his next shot, and I noticed how meticulously he was preparing himself for that shot.

I think most of us have played golf at one time or another in our lives. If not, we have certainly hit golf balls on a driving range. So most of us know what it is like to stand over a golf ball before taking our swing. But this guy was taking a really long time to get set for his shot. He was considering everything from the slope of the green to the speed of the wind and from the bent of the grass to the humidity in the air.

But then it occurred to me why he was taking so much time to hit his shot. Professional golfers are so good that the difference between winning and losing is often one shot. In fact, a tournament can often come down to missing a 30-foot putt by a quarter of an inch. So for that reason, golfers at the highest levels give careful consideration to every little detail of every shot they hit. They don’t even take a one-inch tap-in for granted.

So golfers know what all of us need to know. In the same way that a golf tournament is comprised of about 260 shots, each one extremely important, so life is comprised of all our little deeds that come together to write the storyline of our lives. If our habits cause us to waste “shots” on things that are steering us away from our goals, those habits must be eliminated. Time is too precious to waste on behaviors that rob our potential.