The 80BREAKR golf app will be your favorite app as a fantastic golf scorecard.  However, there’s also a unique functionality integrated to help you break your own personal goal in golf, or help you be in the top 1% of golfers world-wide and break 80.  In this post, I’m going to explain how it can help you and why it’s a unique approach to golf improvement.

There’s an ancient philosophy called stoicism.  Wikipedia is thorough, but sometimes challenging to get to the meaning of things.  Stoicism is not tied to any particular religion, so it’s not surprising many people have never heard of it.  There’s a 2014 book that gives a great overview and practical examples of this approach to life’s problems, hurdles, and obstacles called The Obstacle is the Way, by Ryan Holiday.

So what does this have to do with golf?  I think that the tenets of stoicism and the explanation by Holiday, are great ways to improve your golf game and provide a means to tackle the weaknesses in your game to achieve your goal in golf.

If you’re like me, perhaps you’ve spent countless hours beating balls on the range or spent hundreds of $ on lessons or new equipment, only to head to the course and score about the same as always.

Holiday writes “there have been countless lessons (and books) about achieving success, but no one ever taught us how to overcome failure, how to think about obstacles…… so we are stuck.”

He goes on in his book giving many examples of great historical figures that overcame great obstacles to fantastic success.  How?  “These were people who flipped their obstacles upside down.”  One of the first key concepts of stoicism is to understand what things are in your control and what things are not.  Focus on the things in your control, and accept the things you can not.

The golf course is not an obstacle, it does not fight back.  There are no goal keepers, except when I played with my 4 year old daughter Alessandra.  The ball is not an obstacle, bad luck (bad kick, hitting a sprinkler head, a spike mark) is not an obstacle.  After all, if the weather, the grass, the wind, or the ball were all obstacles, nobody would break 80.

On the first tee at Torrey Pines, I used to feel like I was about to start a great battle; me against the golf course.  I was taking on dirt, grass, sand, and gravity, hoping to conquer them all.  It’s actually quite the opposite when you think about it.  An entire crew works hard daily to maintain the greens, cut the grass, remove leaves, maintain the sand traps, and generally make sure the course is in perfect conditions to help you play well.  You can’t control your competitor either, unless you try mind games before their shot. (I’m guilty, with my brother sometimes I can’t help myself: “make sure you don’t hit it in the lake” just before he tees off, and he hits it directly into the lake)

Obviously, you consider course layout and weather conditions when you play, but they are not obstacles.  Focus on the things you can control, and they are only a few:

• what type of shot to use
• where to aim (center of green, layout, etc..)
• which club to use
• execution of the swing
• your attitude & focus
• how much, when, and what to practice

Those are things you control, but still not obstacles.  The 80BREAKR golf app has a unique & integrated way to capture the true obstacles that prevent you from shooting lower scores.  The Game Improvement mode in 80BREAKR lets you characterize each shot quickly and easily on the golf course, keeping score for you as you play.  At the end of your round, you have a list that shows you what shots were good, which were ok, and what shots were bad.  The bad shots are the obstacles to lower scores.

Ignore all the “good” shots, and for now, ignore the “ok” shots.  Looking at my results from on the course above, I decided to tackle short putts first.  I described this in detail here in an older blog post.

Take your list, and figure out how you will conquer those weak points in your game.  Find a pro to take lessons, get a book, try different techniques, get a new putter, or simply look up and practice drills until when you measure again, short putts are no longer in the bad column.

Have someone video your swing, or go to a pro, and tell them you’re going to measure before and after with the 80BREAKR app.

Next, go after another shot type that keeps showing up in the “bad” column.  Maybe it’s your drives that go OB from time to time, or the skulled pitch shot across the green, or the dreaded shank with a 5 iron.  Focus on each obstacle in turn, and transform them from obstacles to areas of strength.

That’s it!  Find your “obstacles” to lower scores and approach them like a stoic.  You may find your low score goal soon needs to be adjusted downward!