A lot of things have changed in my life recently.
Without boring you with the details, I was forced to take a step back and perform an honest ‘life audit’ on how I was spending my time. The life audit challenge came highly recommended in a podcast I was listening to and I would now like to recommend it to you, too.
In my case, opportunities to collaborate on a variety of exciting projects and developments were coming my way, and I have the propensity to say ‘yes’ to almost everything. In fact, simply everything, period. Long days and nights followed but it got to a point where I sat down and took a long, hard look at how I was spending time away from my family. After all, regardless of any amount of financial reward, being blessed with more time with the people we love is all we are ever going to wish for one day.
My personal life audit was pretty enlightening, as the whole point of undertaking the task of pulling up the ghosts of your past, present and future is to be honest enough with yourself about it all, so that you can create your ideal reality moving forward. During this process, I jumped onto a weekly call with one of my closest friends, Sav, who lives in North Carolina. We were reminiscing about our early days travelling together on Tour, when he asked if I ever imagined where life would have taken us, if it wasn’t for investing two decades failing to chase down our dreams of becoming PGA Tour players.
Pretty dark turn for a casual midweek chat, especially considering the battle wounds from my final full season on the Sunshine Tour last year still gives me those spine-tingling shudders when I recall some of the dreadful shots I hit down the stretch, on a few Friday afternoons while chasing down cut-lines.
I have given it a lot of thought since our chat, though, and honestly believe that each of us are exactly where we should be, at any given moment of our lives. That is certainly true of my own life, as without a tried and tested (and tested) golf career on the course, I don’t believe I would have been offered the same off-course opportunities in my business life. All roads eventually lead us to where we need to go and even those dark, winding, twisted backstreets with a minefield of potholes eventually link us back onto the highway again.
The other interesting conversation I had was with a client in the golf course architecture space and somebody who is now a close friend and mentor. Without being a golfer himself, but obviously keen on learning as much about the game as possible throughout the construction and development of his own residential golf estate, Ken asked me what life was like playing golf professionally. I will leave you with my response below.
‘Imagine that your salary is paid weekly. There are 156 of you employed at the company. Then at the end of each week before going home, you must contend in a series of outdoor activities against your fellow workmates. There are four regulation rounds that need to be played, in order to successfully complete the tournament. But after your first two rounds, the original 156 players gets cut down to the leading 65 (and ties). Only those 65 employees get to take their salary cheques home to spend with their families, and the rest of us don’t. That is exactly what it’s like playing professional golf for a living.’
– This column first appeared in the February 2024 issue of Compleat Golfer magazine.
Photo: Thinus Maritz/Gallo Images
