Keep your eye on the ball

I love the thought-experiment that goes like this:  pretend you’re on a basketball team.  You’re playing the length of the court, jumping high for rebounds, blocking-out for the good position, shooting and moving in for the tip—everything.  Just one problem--- there’s no ball.  You’re doing all of this, fast-breaks and all, with an imaginary ball.  How long do you think you can keep it up?  A few minutes, a minute?  Somehow, without the real goal, the ball, all that activity overwhelms. 



Whereas when you’re really playing, the muscle pain and adversity confronting your opponent is almost ignored by your body, without the ball—it’s too much.

I just saw a statement on a motivational poster, in the bathroom (!), of a factory I inspect, which explains to me the reason for this fatigue.  It shows a picture of a golf ball, lying before a green, placed  back in the picture about 100 yards.  In front of the ball are arrayed 5 large oak trees, with a small passage in the middle of the trunks.  Branches verdant with leaves over-hang the passage.  In front of the green (which, on closer inspection is sloping downhill, away from the approach shot), is a monster lip, and at the base of the lip, an enormous sand trap.  Underneath this picture is a caption:

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.

See?  Obstacles aren’t really real.  They’re a figment of my imagination, only possessing truth when I take my mental “eye” off the goal.  To Tiger Woods, the shot is the only thing he sees, and he lines up the shot with the muscle memory necessary to punch through and make the green.  To the  guys on the court, the pain and effort are parts of the game, as long as the goal—the ball in the bucket—is before their eyes.    Without a ball—when I take my eye off the goal, the obstacles overwhelm.

Focus removes the adversity blocking the accomplishment of my goal.  Obstacles are only present when I take my eye off it.

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