Like many golfers, I spent years believing that I was always one swing thought away from unlocking my best golf.
A bad round meant something needed fixing. A few poor iron shots would send me down a YouTube rabbit hole looking for answers. If my driver wasn't behaving, I convinced myself I needed a new setup, a new grip or maybe even a new club altogether.
Looking back, I wasn't really trying to play golf. I was trying to eliminate mistakes.
Then I read The Four Foundations of Golf by Jon Sherman.
While the book covers strategy, practice and mechanics, the biggest lesson I took from it had nothing to do with swing positions. It had everything to do with expectations.
Golf Is Supposed To Be Difficult
Golf is hard
One of the ideas that really stuck with me was understanding what good golf actually looks like.
Most amateur golfers have wildly unrealistic expectations.
We expect to hit every green from 150 yards. We expect to shoot our handicap every time we play. We expect every range session to produce a breakthrough.
And perhaps most unrealistic of all, we expect perfection.
The truth is, golf is hard.
Even professionals miss greens, make bogeys and hit terrible shots. If the best players in the world can't eliminate mistakes, why do amateurs think they should?
That simple shift in mindset changed everything for me.
The Obsession With Distance
One area where expectations have become completely unrealistic is driving distance.
Thanks to YouTube and social media, you'd think everyone is carrying the ball 300 yards.
The reality is very different.
Most golfers aren't carrying it 300 yards, and they don't need to.
I certainly don't.
For years, I thought hitting it further was the answer to lower scores. While distance absolutely matters, chasing unrealistic numbers can quickly become a frustrating exercise.
Instead of trying to swing out of my shoes every time, I started focusing on hitting more drives in play.
Surprisingly, playing from the fairway with a ball that travelled 240 yards turned out to be far more useful than searching for the occasional 280-yard bomb that finished in the trees.
Moving On From Bad Shots
Another lesson I took from Sherman was learning how to react to mistakes.
For a long time, I would carry a bad shot with me for several holes.
A topped iron or a missed putt would replay in my head while I stood over the next shot. Before long, one mistake had turned into two or three.
What I have gradually realised is that golf doesn't care what happened on the previous hole.
The next shot doesn't know you made a double bogey.
The next putt doesn't know you found the water.
Every shot is an opportunity to start again.
Some of my best rounds have included awful shots. The difference is that I recovered from them instead of letting them ruin the next thirty minutes.
The ability to move on quickly might not be as exciting as a new driver, but I suspect it saves more shots than most equipment purchases ever will.
Stop Firing At Every Flag
Perhaps the biggest change in my strategy has been learning to stop attacking every pin.
Like many golfers, I used to see the flag and automatically assume that was my target.
The problem is that golf courses are designed to punish aggressive misses.
Front pins are often protected by bunkers.
Back pins bring trouble long.
Pins tucked near the edge of greens leave very little margin for error.
Jon Sherman helped me realise that the centre of the green is often the smartest target.
At first, this felt boring.
Surely good golf meant attacking flags?
In reality, aiming for the centre of the green gave me more room for error and resulted in fewer disasters.
And fewer disasters usually lead to lower scores.
Funny how that works.
Accepting Imperfect Golf
Perhaps the biggest change has been understanding that golf doesn't require perfect shots.
It requires enough good shots and fewer terrible ones.
You don't need to stripe every drive.
You don't need to hit every green.
You don't need to hole every ten-footer.
Good golf is often about managing your misses and accepting that mistakes are part of the game.
Ironically, once I stopped demanding perfection from myself, I started enjoying golf more.
Bad rounds became easier to accept.
Good rounds became easier to appreciate.
And I stopped feeling like every mistake meant I needed to rebuild my swing.
Final Thoughts
Jon Sherman didn't transform my golf swing.
He transformed my expectations.
He helped me understand that golf is difficult, that mistakes are inevitable and that chasing perfection is usually a losing battle.
I still hit poor shots.
I still get frustrated.
I still occasionally convince myself that a 300-yard drive is just around the corner.
But I now spend less time searching for perfect golf and more time trying to play the game I have on that particular day.
And strangely enough, that approach has probably helped my scores more than any swing tip I've ever received.
Maybe that's what improvement really is.
Not eliminating mistakes.
Just making fewer of them.