Bryson on Can Do vs How Many Can You Do?
“It’s not about what you CAN DO, it’s about HOW MANY can you do?”
I came across a Bryon Dechambeau video recently, and he made a great point that I’ve tried to articulate before but could never quite find the words to explain.
In the video, Bryson is doing a tape drill, but what caught my attention was his explanation of what most golfers miss when it comes to getting better and more consistent at golf.
Here’s the video:
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To sum it up, Bryson says you need to be able to strike the ball 5, 10, or 20 times in a row, depending on the level of golfer you want to be. A 10 HI needs to hit it five times in a row, a scratch golfer should be able to hit it well ten times in a row, a pro twenty times, etc.
Bryson also talks about a fallacy I often see on the course and one I suffered from for a long time.
Bryson on what most golfers miss:
“I think that’s something a lot of people miss. They focus on, oh, I did it once. ‘That’s good enough. I know how to do it.’ Golf is not a game of I can do it once.”
He then hits us with this gem of a quote:
“It’s not about what you CAN DO; it’s about HOW MANY can you do?”
In my opinion, this is one of the biggest traps golfers fall into. We do something once and think to ourselves… “ok I know how to do this, now I just need to do it again.”
It doesn’t work like that!
We can all hit the occasional bunker shot out of the sand and splash it onto the green. But the question isn’t, can you do it once? The question is, how many times can you do it?
One way to think of it is if you had ten shots from 100 yards out, how many, on average, would you get on the green? Or ten shots from the bunker. How many are struck well and a good shot?
That number of times out of ten, or your average, will be what correlates to your level of play.
Hall of Fame Coach Bill Parcells famously said, “You are what your record says you are.”
In golf, it’s very similar. You are what your scores are. Or, in this case, your ability to hit a good shot multiple times. Not once.
Of course, we can improve and become better, but to do that, we must become more consistent. And that consistency comes from improving our technique and strike quality. Not from hoping we can repeat that ONE good shot.
I’ll end with a quick example from my own experience.
Before I really started getting into golf and using shots gained data to find areas for improvement, I would delude myself into thinking I was “good” at something that I actually wasn’t good at.
For example, I thought I was generally a good chipper. But once I used Arccos, it was glaringly obvious I was, in fact, a bad chipper. Factually NOT GOOD.
Why did I think I was good?
I think it’s because I could hit really good chips. Occasionally. I could get a spin, hit it low, flop shots, and get the ball close. I would remember those good ones, forget the bad ones, and somehow believe that the bad ones were “mistakes” or aberrations.
Well, they weren’t aberrations; they were the norm. The good shots were the aberration. To truly get better at chipping, I needed to be able to hit the ball well consistently and reduce the bad shots. The only way to accomplish this was to work on technique and practice.
Remember what Bryson said…
Golf is not a game of I can do it once. It’s HOW MANY can you do?
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