I loved this. Having recently transitioned from running ultramarathons to trying to break 100 on the course, I figured I already had the discipline to brute force effort my way by hitting balls 4-5 days per week. It wasn't until I worked with a coach and rebuilt my swing from scratch that I began to see any improvement and I actually got worse in the beginning for weeks.
One thing the two sports have in common is that good decision-making has much more leverage than in short distance sports like swimming and shorter road races (and presumably rowing, I wouldn't know). Most of my score improvement in golf so far has been due to making better shot decisions on the course rather than improved shot execution. Feels like a life metaphor in there somewhere but im sensitive about becoming one of those ppl who compare everything in life to golf.
While this is a super interesting post, and worth contemplating, I do not think it is a useful story for the majority of aspiring writers, who often are very good at thinking themselves into a creative block. (Aspiring writer being someone who wants to write, but isn't writing yet)
> Programs like NaNoWriMo mislead aspiring writers. "Write every day" is great advice, but the first 90% of writing a book is often not writing -- it's thinking/planning/researching. There are other golf clubs in that bag. Many writers only start "writing" once their ball is very nearly in the hole.
To use the author's analogy, NaNoWriMo is useful for encouraging the aspiring writer to actually show up tothe golf course or the rowboat, because most people who want to write have talked themselves out of it.
(I would be curious to learn more about the "many writers" claim.)
It's also worth considering how writing a book/post/whatever contributes to an overarching body of work. Two quotes come to mind:
“My subject matter doesn’t vary so much from book to book. Just the surface does. The settings, etc. I tend to write the same book over and over, or at least, I take the same subject I took last time out and refine it, or do a slightly different take on it,” Kazuo Ishiguro says to The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2015/jan/16/kazuo-ish...
I think it's more useful to see writing literally as part of the thinking/planning/researching process, not as separate from it and thus soil for a creative block.
> Some activities have smooth progress bars: rowing, knitting, cycling, climbing, bodybuilding, etc.
I am being pedantic here, but bodybuilding/strength training definitely does not have a smooth progress bar. You need to be prepared for there to be weeks, or even months, where you are just not lifting what you were able to before.
The metaphor is about progress within the activity itself. With rowing progress is measured in distance traveled vs distance remaining. Bodybuilding would be something like number of reps lifted vs remaining.
The author is talking about progress within one game/set/race not over the long term. In lifting during your first rep you can notice that your stance was slightly too wide and adjust it for the other 4 reps. Just like in rowing if your first paddle is a bit out of sync you can fix it.
The point is those are activities with highly repetitive efforts and you can adjust after each one with feedback.
Golfing is not like this, if you miss your first swing, you can’t micro adjust for the second one, because it’s going to take place in a completely different condition.
This is actually true for many forms of physical training, including not just strength training but also endurance training (running, etc.) Plateaus and injuries aside, the basic principle of training is overload followed by recovery, and it's not uncommon during the overload phase to have high levels of fatigue and minimal improvement if not regression.
This is something a lot of casual athletes don't notice because there is a very steep development curve for the untrained, so you just getting better very quickly. Once you have been training for years, gains come much slower.
Rowing (and all other forms of exercise) are definitely non-linear in progression. Most of the time the progression is sub-linear, but rarely you get the other thing too.
From 2013~2023 I would struggle to row 10km in any duration. My typical daily routine would be 2~3km. From 2023+ I can row 10km every single morning 365 days a year without any issues.
Some kind of step-wise change occurred about 2 years ago. It wasn't a gradual or linear event. I vividly recall a day where I just kept going and going without paying attention. I finally look down and there was 14km indicated on the display. At this point I figure I can do 4km less than that every day since it wasn't too bad. 80% of it seems to be psychological. The human body is incredibly adaptive, even over short time frames.
Confidence is probably the most important thing in making progress with things like weight lifting. Definitely in Olympic lifting. I've seen people go from a 135lb to a 225lb clean & jerk in one day with a good coach.
Right. Basically, beginners in any sport are naive to effectively all training stimuli, and so they will respond to a wide variety of inputs.
Once you get adapted it gets harder and harder to find new stimuli that will trigger new adaptation without breaking you down too much. If you're interested in running, Steve Magness and Jonathan Marcus talk about this quite a bit in the On Coaching podcast (https://www.scienceofrunning.com/podcast-2?v=47e5dceea252).
Doubling down here on the analogy - I used to row, and the progress is anything but smooth. There are absolute massive leaps that come from a years worth of training wit very little to show for it in the middle.
I do like his point about taking all the mulligans though!
Golf is like rowing, like knitting, like learning a new language. If you start without instruction, you'll build bad habits that stay with you forever. You can row as hard as you want, but without proper technique, you’ll never get faster. Golf is the same. Effort doesn’t equal improvement unless it's guided. If you start with fundamentals and practice them intentionally, you will get good. But if you repeat the same shitty swing for 10 years with no feedback, you’ll end up exactly where you started.
This obviously has to be false. Progress is made, people learn better ways to play golf and do all the other things. At the frontier, people simply MUST be doing self-guided experimentation and learning from objective results, and since this has always been true, there was once someone who could not play golf at all (because no one could) who figured out how to hit a ball with a club correctly on their own, without learning from anyone else, because that person was the first person who did it. Thus, self-guidance must be possible and self-improvement must also be.
> But if you repeat the same shitty swing for 10 years with no feedback, you’ll end up exactly where you started.
You always have feedback. If your ball doesn't go where you intended, your swing was bad in some way. If you keep doing the same thing without making adjustments based on measured outcomes, yeah, you won't improve. But you can try different things and figure out what works and what doesn't without ANY instruction or outside guidance.
I agree in principal, but: The people at the frontier aren't alone at the top of a mountain, they still have each other for guidance. The master that transcended limits while in isolation is a literary trope.
When I play golf, I just play to have fun. I’ll take 2 shots here and there. I don’t keep my score. I’ve met a few scratch golfers who will secretly tell you that they don’t enjoy golf anymore. It is at that point it transforms from a hobby to an obsession, a line which I’m unwilling to cross.
In my experience as someone who started learning how to golf in their 30s, you need to be playing at least 4x a week to get good enough to start enjoying it in the first place. Unless you like shanking balls 5 yards, looking for lost balls in the woods, or picking your ball up near the green because the rest of your group has already finished the hole. Which to me, is no fun at all.
Thing is though, the more you play, the more expectations you have (or don't have depending on your seriousness).
I used to play frequently, and would be constantly unhappy with my round because I put effort into the game. Due to costs increasing, job being more demanding, and just having other things to do, I've golfed very little this year.
I've played 2 full rounds this year, spent very little time on the range (much more on the putting green, as my residential building has a small turf green that I can just noodle around on at any time) and expected zero from each round.
Ironically, those two rounds have been by and far the best rounds I've ever played in my life. For one of those rounds, I actually took a small-ish but still decently sized dose of magic mushrooms. 2 of my playing group were serious golfers and completely sober, and they were blown away by how relaxed i was when i was tripping. I was calm, relaxed, and enjoying my golf but still completely locked in and focused, and still tripping. I was like +6 through the front 9 from back tees, which in my book is fucking amazing as I generally shoot low 90s.
I also picked it up in my 30s - twice a week for a year with lessons along the way is enough to get you to sub 100, and it’s perfectly fun to play at that level. Going lower than that does take more effort though.
For golf, you don't try harder, you relax more. At the highest level of sports, even rowing, I suspect it's similar. Only in golf do we compare the outcome of a ball flight -- we think we row similar to professionals, but there a ton of difference, you just can't see it in the result of ball flight.
My go-to golf philosophy book is "Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power":
> To relax, you must surrender your mind-even the notion that you have a mind. You will find that relaxing your mind is the same thing as relaxing your body. There should be no separation between your mind's activity and your feeling-awareness of bodily sensations and impulses. Feel yourself letting go so that your body isn't "held" so much--this requires doing the same thing with your mind. When you relax your tissues, nervous system, organs, the muscles around your organs, every-thing, then the energy will flow. It is this very relaxation that allows for the energy, or feeling-attention inherent in your body-being, to circulate, develop, and be utilized.
Have you done any rowing? There is certainly some technique involved and you can't be all tensed up. But at the highest levels everyone has excellent technique. As an endurance sport, performance largely comes down to VO2 Max and pain tolerance, plus a bit from height.
I loved this. Having recently transitioned from running ultramarathons to trying to break 100 on the course, I figured I already had the discipline to brute force effort my way by hitting balls 4-5 days per week. It wasn't until I worked with a coach and rebuilt my swing from scratch that I began to see any improvement and I actually got worse in the beginning for weeks.
One thing the two sports have in common is that good decision-making has much more leverage than in short distance sports like swimming and shorter road races (and presumably rowing, I wouldn't know). Most of my score improvement in golf so far has been due to making better shot decisions on the course rather than improved shot execution. Feels like a life metaphor in there somewhere but im sensitive about becoming one of those ppl who compare everything in life to golf.
While this is a super interesting post, and worth contemplating, I do not think it is a useful story for the majority of aspiring writers, who often are very good at thinking themselves into a creative block. (Aspiring writer being someone who wants to write, but isn't writing yet)
> Programs like NaNoWriMo mislead aspiring writers. "Write every day" is great advice, but the first 90% of writing a book is often not writing -- it's thinking/planning/researching. There are other golf clubs in that bag. Many writers only start "writing" once their ball is very nearly in the hole.
To use the author's analogy, NaNoWriMo is useful for encouraging the aspiring writer to actually show up tothe golf course or the rowboat, because most people who want to write have talked themselves out of it.
(I would be curious to learn more about the "many writers" claim.)
It's also worth considering how writing a book/post/whatever contributes to an overarching body of work. Two quotes come to mind:
“Every novelist spends their life writing the same story over and over.” Danielle Chelosky https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-and-music-j...
“My subject matter doesn’t vary so much from book to book. Just the surface does. The settings, etc. I tend to write the same book over and over, or at least, I take the same subject I took last time out and refine it, or do a slightly different take on it,” Kazuo Ishiguro says to The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2015/jan/16/kazuo-ish...
I think it's more useful to see writing literally as part of the thinking/planning/researching process, not as separate from it and thus soil for a creative block.
> Some activities have smooth progress bars: rowing, knitting, cycling, climbing, bodybuilding, etc.
I am being pedantic here, but bodybuilding/strength training definitely does not have a smooth progress bar. You need to be prepared for there to be weeks, or even months, where you are just not lifting what you were able to before.
The metaphor is about progress within the activity itself. With rowing progress is measured in distance traveled vs distance remaining. Bodybuilding would be something like number of reps lifted vs remaining.
The author is talking about progress within one game/set/race not over the long term. In lifting during your first rep you can notice that your stance was slightly too wide and adjust it for the other 4 reps. Just like in rowing if your first paddle is a bit out of sync you can fix it.
The point is those are activities with highly repetitive efforts and you can adjust after each one with feedback.
Golfing is not like this, if you miss your first swing, you can’t micro adjust for the second one, because it’s going to take place in a completely different condition.
This is actually true for many forms of physical training, including not just strength training but also endurance training (running, etc.) Plateaus and injuries aside, the basic principle of training is overload followed by recovery, and it's not uncommon during the overload phase to have high levels of fatigue and minimal improvement if not regression.
This is something a lot of casual athletes don't notice because there is a very steep development curve for the untrained, so you just getting better very quickly. Once you have been training for years, gains come much slower.
Rowing (and all other forms of exercise) are definitely non-linear in progression. Most of the time the progression is sub-linear, but rarely you get the other thing too.
From 2013~2023 I would struggle to row 10km in any duration. My typical daily routine would be 2~3km. From 2023+ I can row 10km every single morning 365 days a year without any issues.
Some kind of step-wise change occurred about 2 years ago. It wasn't a gradual or linear event. I vividly recall a day where I just kept going and going without paying attention. I finally look down and there was 14km indicated on the display. At this point I figure I can do 4km less than that every day since it wasn't too bad. 80% of it seems to be psychological. The human body is incredibly adaptive, even over short time frames.
Confidence is probably the most important thing in making progress with things like weight lifting. Definitely in Olympic lifting. I've seen people go from a 135lb to a 225lb clean & jerk in one day with a good coach.
> strength training definitely does not have a smooth progress bar
Not at intermediate or advanced levels, but for beginners on a well designed program like “starting strength” it typically does.
Right. Basically, beginners in any sport are naive to effectively all training stimuli, and so they will respond to a wide variety of inputs.
Once you get adapted it gets harder and harder to find new stimuli that will trigger new adaptation without breaking you down too much. If you're interested in running, Steve Magness and Jonathan Marcus talk about this quite a bit in the On Coaching podcast (https://www.scienceofrunning.com/podcast-2?v=47e5dceea252).
Doubling down here on the analogy - I used to row, and the progress is anything but smooth. There are absolute massive leaps that come from a years worth of training wit very little to show for it in the middle.
I do like his point about taking all the mulligans though!
I mean.... None of those activities have smooth progress bars. It's not pedantic to point out the entire premise is flawed.
I don't doubt that the other ones aren't smooth either. I just have no experience with them to say one way or the other.
> A golf game is 65-75 swings over ~5 hours
Aaaah! If only it took me that many swings I'd die a very happy person.
(5 hours is waaaay toooo long to torture oneself).
Golf is like rowing, like knitting, like learning a new language. If you start without instruction, you'll build bad habits that stay with you forever. You can row as hard as you want, but without proper technique, you’ll never get faster. Golf is the same. Effort doesn’t equal improvement unless it's guided. If you start with fundamentals and practice them intentionally, you will get good. But if you repeat the same shitty swing for 10 years with no feedback, you’ll end up exactly where you started.
> If you start without instruction, you'll build bad habits that stay with you forever.
> Effort doesn’t equal improvement unless it's guided.
This obviously has to be false. Progress is made, people learn better ways to play golf and do all the other things. At the frontier, people simply MUST be doing self-guided experimentation and learning from objective results, and since this has always been true, there was once someone who could not play golf at all (because no one could) who figured out how to hit a ball with a club correctly on their own, without learning from anyone else, because that person was the first person who did it. Thus, self-guidance must be possible and self-improvement must also be.
> But if you repeat the same shitty swing for 10 years with no feedback, you’ll end up exactly where you started.
You always have feedback. If your ball doesn't go where you intended, your swing was bad in some way. If you keep doing the same thing without making adjustments based on measured outcomes, yeah, you won't improve. But you can try different things and figure out what works and what doesn't without ANY instruction or outside guidance.
I agree in principal, but: The people at the frontier aren't alone at the top of a mountain, they still have each other for guidance. The master that transcended limits while in isolation is a literary trope.
When I play golf, I just play to have fun. I’ll take 2 shots here and there. I don’t keep my score. I’ve met a few scratch golfers who will secretly tell you that they don’t enjoy golf anymore. It is at that point it transforms from a hobby to an obsession, a line which I’m unwilling to cross.
In my experience as someone who started learning how to golf in their 30s, you need to be playing at least 4x a week to get good enough to start enjoying it in the first place. Unless you like shanking balls 5 yards, looking for lost balls in the woods, or picking your ball up near the green because the rest of your group has already finished the hole. Which to me, is no fun at all.
Thing is though, the more you play, the more expectations you have (or don't have depending on your seriousness).
I used to play frequently, and would be constantly unhappy with my round because I put effort into the game. Due to costs increasing, job being more demanding, and just having other things to do, I've golfed very little this year.
I've played 2 full rounds this year, spent very little time on the range (much more on the putting green, as my residential building has a small turf green that I can just noodle around on at any time) and expected zero from each round.
Ironically, those two rounds have been by and far the best rounds I've ever played in my life. For one of those rounds, I actually took a small-ish but still decently sized dose of magic mushrooms. 2 of my playing group were serious golfers and completely sober, and they were blown away by how relaxed i was when i was tripping. I was calm, relaxed, and enjoying my golf but still completely locked in and focused, and still tripping. I was like +6 through the front 9 from back tees, which in my book is fucking amazing as I generally shoot low 90s.
I also picked it up in my 30s - twice a week for a year with lessons along the way is enough to get you to sub 100, and it’s perfectly fun to play at that level. Going lower than that does take more effort though.
For golf, you don't try harder, you relax more. At the highest level of sports, even rowing, I suspect it's similar. Only in golf do we compare the outcome of a ball flight -- we think we row similar to professionals, but there a ton of difference, you just can't see it in the result of ball flight.
My go-to golf philosophy book is "Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power":
> To relax, you must surrender your mind-even the notion that you have a mind. You will find that relaxing your mind is the same thing as relaxing your body. There should be no separation between your mind's activity and your feeling-awareness of bodily sensations and impulses. Feel yourself letting go so that your body isn't "held" so much--this requires doing the same thing with your mind. When you relax your tissues, nervous system, organs, the muscles around your organs, every-thing, then the energy will flow. It is this very relaxation that allows for the energy, or feeling-attention inherent in your body-being, to circulate, develop, and be utilized.
Don't know how this affects daily writing ;)
Have you done any rowing? There is certainly some technique involved and you can't be all tensed up. But at the highest levels everyone has excellent technique. As an endurance sport, performance largely comes down to VO2 Max and pain tolerance, plus a bit from height.
I appreciate the goal of this article... But everything has plateaus. Progress is never linear.
Analogies all the way down.