Brian Johnson uses a golf story from Darren Donnelly to explain why a clear, specific target helps your brain and nervous system perform better. Bob Rotella and John Maxwell back up the idea: visualize where you want to go, ignore what you don't want, and focus narrows everything else out.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. In our last couple plus ones, we talked about dominating your environment and hitting a crazy number of heroic targets. My eyes still go like this and my head still goes like this explode emoji when I imagine our heroic friend dominating 150 targets per day. Let's go, hero. Firing me up. Seriously. Today I want to go back to our tour. Through Darren Donnelly, Sports for the Soul series, we're going to explore another great idea from relentless optimism. Quick context. This passage is from a chapter in which our baseball manager guide Wally, takes our aspiring hero Bobby to the golf course. Darren writes, and I quote, wally kept his gaze straight ahead. First, let me tell you what I hear. I hear you telling me all the places you don't want to go. The trees to the right, the water to the left, the sand in the hill. These are all the places you want to avoid me. I look out there and I see a beautiful, soft, welcoming green with a flag pinned slightly to my left. It's a safe landing zone just waiting for my ball. That's where I want to land. That's what I'm focused on. That spot and only that spot. I close my eyes, I feel my club, my grip. I picture myself swinging easily and I see my golf ball landing right in that spot. Wally turned to me. Bobby, your destination is determined by what you focus on. You have to be very clear about where you want to go. Once you know where you want to go, you have to visualize yourself getting there and forget about all the places where you don't want to end up. I want you to focus only on where you want to go for these last three holes, end quote. That passage makes me think of a number of things. Of course, the first thing I think about is targeted thinking. If we want to move from victim to created a hero, we need to quit focusing on and quit complaining about all the things that aren't going the way we want and shift our attention to getting really clear on what we really want. Then I thought of parallel wisdom from Bob Rotella's. Golf is not a game of perfect. He tells us, and I quote, the brain and the nervous system respond best when the eyes focus on the smallest possible target. Why this is so is not important. It just happens to be the way the human system works. Perhaps it has to do with the evolutionary advantage enjoyed by those cavemen who focused on the hearts of attacking tigers as opposed to those cavemen who merely looked in the tiger's general direction and hurled their spears. He says it is true in virtually every sport. We teach basketball players to look not at the backboard, nor even the rim, but at the net loop in the back of the rim. We teach quarterbacks to aim not at the receiver, nor even his number, but at his hands. The smaller the target, the sharper the athletes of focus, the better his concentration and the better the results. When an athlete locks his eyes and mind onto a small target, the ball naturally tends to follow. And I thought of John Maxwell in his wisdom from how successful people think he tells us. I quote him one time on the golf course. I followed a golfer who neglected to put the pin back in the hole after he putted. Because I could not see my target, I couldn't focus properly. My focus quickly turned to frustration into poor play. To be a good golfer, a person needs to focus on a clear target. The same is true in thinking. Focus helps you to know the goal and to achieve it. End quote. That's today's plus one. What do you want focus on that today?
