I see 20+ handicaps trying to pull off the most amazing shots all the time, usually with little or no luck. 240 yards out of a bunker, uphill, over water: No problem, let’s try to pull that one off. Hell, Tiger just did it this past weekend. Splash!
Tiger has won 3 times in 4 stroke play events already this year. He is the front runner to win the Masters and some are saying the Grand Slam. His game is so on right now, that he once again induces fear in other players as he did in the 2000 season. Understandably, the media is making a big deal about his season thus far. However, very little ink throughout his whole career, has been dedicated to how much time Tiger spends working to get to where he is today.
Golf Digest ran an article a few years ago about the 3 hours a day he spends at the gym and the 5 miles he runs a day, but that is about all I have seen. Nothing about the 1,000 balls a day he bangs a day on the range. Nothing about the 500 bunker shots a day from different lies he hits. Nothing about the umpteen thousands of putts he strokes each and every day. Certainly nothing about how much time he spends chipping. The media just shows the famous one.
The same could be said for business. If you want to get really good, you need to hit more then a few balls before your round. The Google acquisition of Writely has received a lot of press for various reasons, but most of the press has been around this new Web 2.0 company that has only been around for 7 months being acquired and making the founders millions. Lots of press about the so-called overnight success, but nothing on what it took to actually get to that point. You would almost think that these guys woke up one morning and found they had been given the ability to write code.
Peter Rip has a great back story on the founders of Writely. In it he shares that this ‘overnight’ success has taken 20 years of building applications for various platforms and different companies. These guys put a lot more blood, sweat and tears into application development then the 7 or so months that Writely has been around.
Like Tiger Woods working non-stop to get to this point in his career, it is important to remember that in business, overnight successes are rarely overnight. If it were easy, anyone could do it.
