Passion

Marijke, my girlfriend, doesn’t understand what I’m doing.  She appreciates that I am happier now and knows that it is the right thing for me to do, but still, she doesn’t see how I can do it.  It’s not the hours of standing in the cold rainy Portland winter, or the monotonous task of putting for hundreds of hours on end, or even the fact that I’m not getting paid to do any of this.  Rather, it’s the fact that before I started this journey, I truly had no idea what golf was all about and definitely was not passionate about the sport.  She doesn’t see how I could dedicate myself to something that I was not passionate about.  It’s a valid point.

I’ve thought a lot about this, and think that I have an answer.

First off, I’m perhaps a little “off” myself!  I think that I must be in order to leave a well paying and comfortable lifestyle for something that most anyone would say was impossible at best (at least that’s what they tell me).  Seems that most people who dream of quitting their day jobs have something in mind that they would want to replace that job, something that they have wanted to do for their entire life.

For me, though, it wasn’t about replacing my job with my hobby.  My passion was the idea of human potential and what I wanted to do was test that potential.  So, it could have been anything, really.  And, to tell you the truth, I’m not exactly sure how I ended up picking golf.  Everyone asks “why golf” and I never have a good answer except to say that golf represents anything that you could imagine doing (Doctor, Lawyer, Architect, Plumber, Skin Diver, etc).  It’s also competitive enough to make the goal nearly impossible, yet there is a crack in the window of success in the distance that you can keep your eyes focused on.

When it boils down to it, the problem for me was not what to pick for my 10,000 hour plan, but making sure that once I picked it I do not waiver from my determination.  Regardless of what it was going to be, once I started I was all in.  It’s just not possible to second guess yourself when you are trying to be great at something.  If this was a hobby, sure, you could put down the clubs and pick up a basketball for a few months and then return to golf without missing a beat, but this isn’t a hobby and good is just not good enough.  Now I find myself immersed in the passions of learning golf, because there is no other way to do this right and not doing it right would be a waste of my time.

That’s my answer.  This project was not born out of passion for the game of golf, but passion for the game was born out of the project.  No matter what you choose in life, do it passionately and you will see great successes.  That’s my mantra and I’m sticking to it.

Time to get back to the course!