Drive for Show But Put For Dough

Small Steps & Giant Leaps

The Buzz

As a one time golfing enthusiast it always interested me that amongst everything the game is about, I really never cared for the score.

For me it was always all about the Drive and putting could be left for others who cared about the numbers, and true to form, my results showed it. I had a massive drive and a massive score to boot!

That feeling, early in the morning, as the sun rises and the air is still fresh and cool, when you strike the ball just right, with a fully wound and graceful swing, is hard to beat. It’s worth about 10 balls in the lake!

To this day, I wonder about my strategy, it seems to have implications throughout all my life. I have never cared too much for results (or show) and it shows.

So really it was,

“Drive for the Buzz”

but let’s not nitpick.

As I age and wisdom slowly but grudgingly descends upon me, I’ve decided that perhaps, some kick ass putting would be good too.

I mean Tiger was good at both, “Drive for Show and Putt for Dough”

Focus on One Thing

Apparently, that is a mantra of our time. Plenty of books have been written around this, you know, finding that niche, digging deep and becoming the ‘best’ (whatever that means) at that the one thing.

However, that has never been my style and I have an interest in too much life has to offer. Focusing on one thing, sounds like a nightmare to me.

I’ve decided to try another strategy, let’s call it The Vikid Strategy, cause I’m really good at adding ‘Vikid’ in front of just about anything… in fact, with probability nearing certainty, I am the worlds best at that!

The Vikid Strategy

So we will focus on One Thing after all but we will do it, doing the 100 things we love.

I’ve written about this before, but you know, repetition is a good thing!

We focus on Ease. Always on ease. That’s the one thing.

It has the benefit of allowing you to do multiple things, well any number of things, as long as it is always done with ease.

It generally means doing things slower. Slower is easier than faster. It means focusing on being utterly relaxed, whatever you are doing, even when doing the bench press. What is relaxed, is the mind, not the pectorals, those you can crunch, if that’s your fancy.

It will generally mean doing one thing at a time, as doing two things at once isn’t that easy, not until you’ve mastered the one thing.

It will really mean not caring about the score, because measuring yourself daily against some score, even a previous personal record, doesn’t sound like ease to me. It sounds like stress.

It will mean avoiding a bunch of things that add complexity to life and not thinking too much about that, while your at it.

It means practicing life with form and taking the buzz in “perfect execution”. Not perfection in the result, but perfection in the way things are done.

It means asking yourself,

“Was that done the right way, and with ease? Or am I tense, distracted, self conscious.”

It means finding the beauty in the simplest things and going with that.

It means, picking the 100 things or the 1000 things, you love and doing them without restriction but always on form and with ease.

This is all good… but it suddenly feels like I am writing Chicken Soup for the Soul!

Certainly not a direction, Dear Reader, I want to go in.

However, I think this strategy actually has deeper implications, so permit me to go a little…

Veedak Chopra

It implies something deeper, which was also expressed by Gautama Viddha (his real name) some 2500 years ago.

It appears to me the the simplest and easiest “way of being” is to gradually let go of desire itself.

I mean desire is quite complex, it looks simple once it has ascended from the murky waters of the subconscious and finally reached light of your thinking mind. But when you really ask yourself, “why do I want that?”, answers seem to be fleeting.

Often, I get a ‘just because…’,

but the mind doesn’t like nonexistent explanations and thus an elaborate story is created to explain the sensation. There have been numerous studies conducted on split brain patients that confirm this kind story creating mechanism in human beings.

Here’s an excerpt for an article written in the Atlantic about the phenomenon:

In a 1977 study with a 15-year-old split-brain patient from Vermont identified as P. S., Gazzaniga (then a professor at Dartmouth) and his graduate assistant Joseph LeDoux performed a visual test similar to the one Jenkins had undergone years earlier. The researchers asked P. S. to stare straight ahead at a dot, and then flashed a picture of a chicken foot to the brain’s left hemisphere and a picture of a snowy scene to the brain’s right hemisphere. Directly in front of the patient—so that he could process the sight with both hemispheres—was a series of eight other pictures. When the researchers asked him to point to the ones that went with the images he saw, P. S. pointed to the picture of a chicken head and a picture of a snow shovel.

So far, the results were as expected: Each hemisphere had led P. S. to choose an image that went along with the one that he had seen from that side moments earlier. The surprise came when the researchers asked him why he chose these two totally unrelated images.

Because the left hemisphere, which controls language, had not processed the snowy scene, they believed P. S. wouldn’t be able to verbally articulate why he chose the snow shovel. “The left brain doesn’t know why,” Gazzaniga told me. “That information is in the right hemisphere.” Neither hemisphere knew what the other had seen, and because the two sides of his brain were unable to communicate, P.S. should have been confused when Gazzaniga asked him why he had picked the two images he did.

But as Gazzaniga recalled in his memoir, P. S. didn’t skip a beat: “Oh, that’s simple,” the patient told them. “The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”

Here’s what happened, as the researchers later deduced: Rather leading him to simply say, “I don’t know” to Gazzaniga’s question, P.S.’s left brain concocted an answer as to why he had picked those two images. In a brief instant, the left brain took two unconnected pieces of information it had received from the environment—the two images—and told a story that drew a connection between them.

Gazzaniga went on to replicate the findings of this study many times with various co-authors: When faced with incomplete information, the left brain can fill in the blanks. Based on these findings Gazzaniga developed the theory that the left hemisphere is responsible for our sense of psychological unity—the fact that we are aware of and reflect upon what is happening at any given moment.

“It’s the part of the brain,” Gazzaniga told me, “that takes disparate points of information in and weaves them into a storyline and meaning. That it’s central gravity.”

(highlights and emphasis are added are my own)

So it is my contention, that we proceed, chasing a desire “after the fact”. With a conviction that we actually ‘want’ it, based on some story that was made up to support the sensation.

Split Brain or not, we are all split-brained.

So why was I out on the golf course all those years ago? And what can it teach us?

It was for the beautiful morning air, to spend quality time with my father and to enjoy that feeling of hitting the ball far into the fairway, like an astronaut launching a rocket to the moon.

However, I could have taken equal pleasure in the greenwalk, like Neil Armstrong, planting the flag, making small putts for man but taking giant leaps for Vikid-Kind.

And that’s,

The Vikid Truth