Your ego is not your friend during a round.

It's the voice that tells you to bomb it when the hole that doesn't call for it. Talks you into firing at tight targets.

Your ego makes a bogey feel like a personal failure.

Ego makes golf personal. But golf is not personal. Golf doesn’t know you even exist, that’s pretty impersonal.

The course doesn't know your name. The wind doesn't care about your ball. The lip out shouldn’t make you pull on a gun on the hole.

None of it is personal.

It just is.

Here's the thing about ego in golf specifically.

In other sports you can muscle through on ego. Pure will, pure adrenaline, try harder and sometimes it works. Basketball, football, running — effort has a direct relationship with outcome.

Golf doesn't work quite that way.

Try harder on a golf course, generally not a great outcome. You can grip tighter, swing faster, stand over putts thinking instead of rolling . The harder you try, it just doesn’t translate over hours of playing.

Ego speeds everything up. Golf requires you to slow down.

The players who actually score — not the ones who swing pretty, the ones who shoot numbers — they figured this out.

They're not playing against you. They're not playing against the course. They're barely even playing against par.

They're just playing. Shot by shot. Hole by hole. Whatever happened before is gone. Whatever's coming next doesn't exist yet.

Just this shot. Just this target. Just this swing.

Destroy your ego doesn't mean stop caring.

You need to care. Caring is what drives the work, the obsession, the thousands of reps that build a game worth playing.

But caring about the outcome of this specific shot while you're standing over it — that's ego. And it's costing you strokes.

Care about the process. Be indifferent to the result.

That's the game worth playing. That's when golf starts to feel like something other than punishment.

Play well,
Mark

Where does your ego show up most on the course? Hit reply.