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Never Play Golf at Night
Jason’s frustration with his slow progress toward losing forty pounds was fake.
He was legitimately frustrated, but the cause of it was vapor. He was
disappointed because the previous time he lost weight it had felt so easy. The
pounds had come off quickly. It wasn’t as hard as this time.
Only he doesn’t have any data to back that up, only memories and feelings
and the chirping of perfectionism. He didn’t keep track of the effort he expended
last time. He didn’t have any real information to review. Study after study has
shown that eyewitness accounts can be incredibly sketchy. Mere moments after a
violent crime, bystanders will remember the guy definitely had a mustache. Or
he definitely didn’t. He was tall and wearing a long black coat. Or he was short
and didn’t have a coat on at all.
Our memories are constantly editing themselves and therefore are unreliable.
Feelings are not much better. Chances are, the first time he lost that weight, it
was very difficult. There were hard moments where he fought for another breath
on an exercise bike. The scale didn’t always show results that time either. But
his feelings tell another story.
If someone can’t accurately remember a moment like a robbery a day after it
happened, why do we trust our memories of events that occurred months or
years ago?
If Jason had taken more points of data than just the scale, he could quiet the
doubtful voice of perfectionism that crept into his progress review.
Here are data points he missed:
Pants size
Shirt size
BMI
Number of times he jogged
Number of miles he ran
Number of times he worked with the trainer
Food diary
Some of those data points would have shown progress, like pants size, while
others would have proved process, like number of times he ran.
But like most people who try to finish something, he didn’t leave himself

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But like most people who try to finish something, he didn’t leave himself
enough data points for the future.
Since you decided to gather some data, though, let’s discuss what will
happen when you review it, or why you should never play golf at night.
My favorite thing about golf is not playing.
Currently, I play once every two years, or whenever we have Thanksgiving
with my wife’s family. One time I lost nineteen balls during a round of eighteen
holes. Jenny’s uncle now brings me sacks of range balls that have been removed
from the bottom of lagoons to play with.
Last year he didn’t bring me a bag of clubs to borrow, just a handful of irons
zip-tied as if they’d been taken hostage at a sporting goods store. Is there
anything classier than showing up at a country club and handing the cart guy
your fistful of zip-tied clubs? Careful with this, son; that’s one of my best zip
ties.
I’m not good at golf and you’d stink, too, if you only practiced at night.
Journalist Matthew Syed noted in his book Black Box Thinking: Why Most
People Never Learn from Their Mistakes—But Some Do what a bad plan playing
at night is if you want to get better. He writes, “Suppose that instead of
practicing in daylight, you practice at night—in the pitch-black. In these
circumstances, you could practice for ten years or ten thousand years without
improving at all. How could you progress if you don’t have a clue where the ball
has landed? . . . You wouldn’t have any data to improve your accuracy.”
We’d all judge people who play golf at night, well, judge and not give them
our real phone numbers. That’s a Google Voice opportunity right there.
The reason we’d find them so foolish is that for all their playing, they’d
never get better. They could spend every night out there in the dark trying to
play perfectly, and it wouldn’t improve their game because as soon as the ball
left the tee, it would disappear.
Most of us chase our goals this same way. The minute some action we’ve
taken has left our hands, it’s gone, lost somewhere in the busyness of the day.
How many inches have we lost during our diet? What percent of body fat?
How many hours did we work out this week versus last week? How much has
our salary grown over the last three years? How many total words did we write
this summer versus last? How many dollars do we have saved up for our next
vacation? Is our progress on this goal any different from the last goal?
Do you think it’s accidental that casinos don’t put clocks on the walls or use
a lot of windows in their designs? They know that if they remove that bit of data,

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you’ll be more likely to play longer. Without knowing the time or that the day
has become night, it’s easy to get lost in the action. Even their motto hints at
perfectionism. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” As if you could have a
disastrous weekend in Vegas and have your real life back home remain perfect
without any consequences from the trip.
When you play golf in the dark, you’re prone to make a lot of mistakes.
One Friday, my team launched the sales of a new online course. It was the
first day people could buy it and we had twelve hundred people on the early
sign-up list. That meant we could e-mail more than a thousand people who had
directly expressed interest in this course. Those were what you call “warm
leads” in sales terms.
Knowing those numbers, what kind of response would you expect? Let’s
guess at some data, since that’s usually what you have to do when you’re golfing
at night without any real numbers. If we sold the course to 10 percent of the
audience, that would mean 120 people would sign up. Maybe that’s too
aggressive, though; 5 percent would still mean 60 people. I started to run the
numbers and got really excited about the possibilities. Fortunately, data came to
the rescue.
My social media guy, Bryan Allain, texted me and said, “Just as a reminder,
we’ve never seen better than 0.4% conversion on our Friday sneak peek e-mails.
Our initial launch was our best, 55 sales on 13,900 e-mails. Feb was 16 sales,
May was 26, September was 11. So by those numbers we should expect 5 sales
today with our 1,200-person launch.”
That text message kept me off the ledge when we ended up selling only four
courses that day. Without the data, I might have thought we were failing. I
would have grown discouraged at the terrible turnout. Instead, with some data, I
knew we were right on track. I didn’t let perfectionism tell me the failure was a
disaster.
Data tells the truth and makes things a lot easier. So why don’t we use it?