Landing in the Fairway of Life
Golf, the positioning game
Golf is a hard sport. To be quite honest, I am terrible at golf. I don’t even know what my handicap may be or where to start on what it could be. I am work in progress with a lot more work needed than progress made. I recently got into golf over the past year, thanks to a gracious gift from my grandfather who gave me a set of clubs. These days due to my skills, I mostly scramble whenever I play. A scramble consists of a team of 2-4 people and after each shot from each player, the group picks the best shot to move forward with.
One of my golf career highlights is, during a scramble, I was able to birdie a par-4 myself. My teammate and I took every single one of my shots because I played my ball well and positioned myself correctly. Tiger Woods, I am coming for you. Unfortunately, this is sadly a career highlight for me at this point but nonetheless, everyone must start somewhere.
Golf is a positioning game that spares no one. Each hole is a different challenge and the success of conquering that challenge is dependent on each successive shot that is taken. One second, you drive the fairway perfectly and the next, you are in the woods. If you end up in behind a tree, your next shot is most of the time a wash. Just fighting to get back on track and trying to play the ball so maybe you can scrape by with a par or bogey. Your score is dependent on how you position your ball on each previous shot.
Take the fifth hole at Augusta National, the course of the Masters. It is one of the hardest holes in all of golf. Numerous times, professionals have shot a quadruple bogey on this hole, four shots over par.
It is a 495-yard, par-4 with bunkers lining the fairway on the left side. Trees line the fairway on both sides and if you end up to the far left or short right, you could get to become good friends with the trees. Gary Player said, “Also, if you leave your approach short right or left, you’ve got to be Houdini to escape it with a par.” One bad initial shot and you could be toast.
If you played the par-4, out of the tee box, you could either try to bomb your ball over the bunker or you could position yourself well and play it long right. Out of 100 times, of trying each shot, you position yourself to become “luckier” and potentially birdie the hole if you just play it safe and go long right off the tee. If you just try and bomb it over the bunker each time, there is a good chance you will just end up in the tress or the bunker more often than not. It is a fine line to dance along. Playing the shot is all about how you wish to position yourself. If you take the safer alternative, you are allowing yourself a better opportunity to birdie the hole because you are still on the fairway and not stuck in a bunker. Yes, you can still birdie the hole if you end up in the bunker but it just became a lot harder to do.
You want to position your shot in such a way that you can handle whatever is thrown at you. Golf can be all about positioning your ball to help anticipate and play your next shot. If I try and go here, how does this set me up for the rest of the hole? One shot sets up the next. Golf is a metaphor. A metaphor of life.
Just like golf, life is all about positioning. As the ball is to golf, we are to life. As the club is to golf, our decision making is to life. As the club guides the ball through the air and ultimately determines where it may go so does our decision making to the path we take in life. As a bunker is to golf, a bump in the road is to life. A slight inconvenience that makes things just a little harder but nothing we can’t overcome. Golf is all about how we can play to put ourselves in the best position to succeed and achieve a successful score. How can we play the ball not to end up in the bunker but in the middle of the fairway. How can we position ourselves to succeed.
There is a quote that encapsulates positioning quite well and reads, “The harder I work, the luckier I become.” This quote is not about being a hard worker is directly correlated to being lucky, rather it is about working hard positions you to see a lot more opportunities and then allows you to pounce on those opportunities when you are afforded them. The work has been put in until this point, so you are prepared for whatever is thrown your way. More opportunities allow for more luck. The more chances you give yourself the more opportunities you allow for yourself to become lucky, the law of large numbers.
Some say those who work their dream job are lucky. There is a degree of luck involved with everything but getting to reach the job you have always wanted is really the byproduct of hard work, resilience, and positioning. It is very rare someone gets their dream job right out of college. Rather, it is a cumulation of putting themselves in positions to slowly work towards it and slowly climb the mountain of getting there.
The first step might be getting your foot in the door at the company who has your dream job. Next step might be getting in the department that has your dream job and slowly working your way up the chain to the end goal. To expect the instant gratification of just immediately landing your dream job is wrong. It is like hitting a piñata and expecting it to break on the first swing. It is like chopping down a tree and expecting the tree to collapse under the weight of the axe on the first hit. It is like Tiger Woods expecting to ace, another word for hole-in-one in the golf world, the fifth hole at Augusta National.
It is not to say Tiger Woods can’t eventually get to his desired score of below par, just like it is not to say we can’t eventually get to our dream job. Just like Tiger Woods needs to position himself on each shot to allow himself to be able to birdie the hole, we need to position ourselves in a way that slowly allows us the opportunities to obtain that dream job or obtain that goal. When the piñata breaks and the candy falls out, when the tree finally collapses to the weight of the axe, or when Tiger birdies the hole, it is not the result of one swing or one shot, it is the result of being in a situation to finally see the goal materialize. The result of continuing to place yourself in a position to succeed, or the result of hitting the piñata in the right spot time after time, and to eventually see all the hard work materialize and produce the desired outcome. The harder we work to position ourselves, the luckier we will become.
So much of life is about positioning and things we love to do in life are all about how we position ourselves. Just like golf, trading stocks is a positioning game. We have a series of underlying and trades that make up our portfolio. We are short Tesla because we think the free cash flow may be not as great with Musk owning Twitter. We are long gold as an inflationary hedge. We are short Nvidia because surely the stock can’t go up forever, right?
When the markets have binary events like earnings, a CPI release, or a federal reserve meeting announcement we undoubtedly have a way we want to be positioned going into those events. If we think inflation is going to be hot on the next CPI report, we certainly wouldn’t want to set ourselves up to be long when the report is released. Trading stocks is a positioning game, understanding how one event might affect another and the trickle-down effects of a single event into the rest of the market.
If I thought a stock was going to get killed off bad earnings, I wouldn’t be long and trade a bullish options trade into earnings. No, I would be short and put myself in a position to make money off of my convictions and money off of the stock plummeting. So why don’t we trade our lives like the stock market and make sure that we are positioned correctly into big events?
As earnings of our favorite stock may be to our portfolio, an interview with our dream company is to our life. We want to be correctly situated going into the interview and know that each individual, independent event leading up to the interview will have an effect on it. Spending time study and reviewing behavioral based interview question is a much smarter “trade” to put on than going out with friends the night before the interview. We want to make sure our portfolio is positioned correctly going into a big event just like we should want to make sure our interview skills and resume are polished going into our dream job interview.
The actual interview to land the job is just like the putt to make par. However, how tough that putt may be is determined by every shot before it. Your shot off the tee is just as important as your shots on the green. Just like the preparation and positioning going into the interview is just as important as the actual interview. I would much rather have a 5-foot putt for par than a 27-foot putt for par but what ultimately determines how long that putt is, is everything that comes before. If you land in the woods, or don’t adequately prepare for the interview, there is a much greater chance you could be facing the 27-foot putt for par or an uphill battle to land the job.
Life is merely just a huge game of golf where each round is a year of our lives. A single shot could seem small in the moment but that single shot will create a domino effect that will play a large role in how that round of life may go. Score bad on one hole because of one bad shot or one bad play of the ball and that could sink your score for the round. Position yourself in such a way that allows for each shot to build on each other and when it is time to score that hole or round of life, the score you have will be considered a success because you realize it is all of game of positioning. Just remember when taking your shot and trying to figure out where you want to play or position the ball, it is much easier to shoot off of a fairway rather than out of a bunker.