“The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.” -DuBois

I was just in middle school when Tiger Woods won the 1997 Masters. My friends and I didn’t pay attention to golf until Tiger came along, so we easily identified him as the greatest golfer to ever live and pegged him as being at the top of his game.

Our convictions were driven by naivete, but few golf analysts disagreed with the statements that 1) Tiger was at the top of his game and 2) he was the greatest golfer to ever live.

What happened next excited and floored me - Tiger decided his swing wasn’t good enough and decided to reinvent it. Huh? The greatest golfer to ever live is at the top of his game and his swing isn’t good enough?!

The immediate result was he lost the his next 10 majors.

If you know anything about golf then you know that there are 4 majors a year, so losing 10 majors in a row spans over two and a half years. When you’re only 13, two and a half years is nearly 20% of your life - in other words, it seems like forever.

We still thought Tiger was good, maybe even great, but not once-in-a-lifetime great. He meddled with his swing, he got greedy, over-ambitious, cocky, over-analytical - whatever it was that led him to try and fix something that didn’t seem broken clearly cost him and was a lesson to us all. 

Then he proceeded to take his new swing and win seven of the next 11 majors. Again, if you know anything about golf, I don’t need to tell you how legendary that is.

What I learned from Tiger during that period in his career has always stuck with me when thinking about my own career. Like most people, I’ve had lots of opportunities to contemplate changing directions and I have to wonder if the cost of starting over, of sucking while trying to learn something new is worth it, or if it’s better to focus on my strengths and move further, faster on my current path.

Right now, my learning to code is exactly like Tiger learning a new swing. I’m sucking, and not just at learning to code. I’m new to it, so that was to be expected. The hard pill to swallow is that I’m sucking at my career by focusing my time and energy on coding rather than the million other things I could be doing to land a better job, make more money, or just make a difference at an organization.

I know that if I can become a competent programmer, I’ll be in a much better position to realize my dreams, to win majors. But I also know that it’s possible to realize some of my dreams without ever learning programming, just as I’m sure Tiger must have known that it was possible to win majors without changing his swing, so how can I keep at it?

If I don’t learn to program and focus on my current strengths, my worst case scenario doesn’t seem all that bad. Tiger was winning majors with his current swing, so if he doesn’t change it, his worst case scenario isn’t bad either.

That line of thinking is completely wrong though. It is bad, because when you know what you could become, no matter how great what you are now is, it is never enough and you’ll be miserable.

So I’m sticking with learning to code and the longer I stick with it the more I lose the fear that I’ve completely derailed my life. At the end of the night I can sleep because I know I made a tough decision for the right reasons, so the doubters, whether they’re in my head or in real life, don’t get to me.

(Photo credit to Tiger Woods A to Z)

Some of the highlights:

“Pre-dodgeball I went thru 3-4 years thinking I was going to meet some magical engineer who would build all the stuff I was thinking about.  But I never met that person, so I taught myself ASP and MS Access (yikes! eventually PHP an MySQL) out of a book and got to work just hacking stuff together.  I’m still a really shitty programmer”

“Don’t let people tell you your ideas won’t work…If you’re passionate about an idea that’s stuck in your head, find a way to build it so you can prove to yourself that it doesn’t work.”