A Three Handicap Is a Lagging Indicator
What getting good at golf at the age of 53 taught me about patience, practice and the score you can't argue with.
Where I started
When we moved to Madrid, I was a 10 handicap. A respectable weekend golfer. Good enough to enjoy a client round, not good enough to be dangerous. Today I play off a 3.
People assume the difference is talent, or a new set of clubs, or a swing tip from a pro. It isn’t. It’s three years of boring, repeatable work, most of it on the parts of the game nobody posts about. The number on my card is the result. The work happened long before the number moved.
I wrote recently that a résumé is a lagging indicator. So is a handicap. By the time it says 3, the work that made it a 3 is already in the past.
Why Madrid
Part of this is geography. Madrid has some of the best golf weather in Europe. You can play almost 365 days a year, and there are excellent courses within half an hour of the city, including my home club, the Real Sociedad Hípica Española Club de Campo. That’s a lot to say out loud.
Part of it is the schedule. Working New York hours from Spain gives me mornings back. Three or four mornings a week, before the first American email arrives, I’m on the range or the course. In New York, golf was an event. Here it became a habit, and habits are what move a handicap.
What actually moved the number
If I’d been asked five years ago how to get better, I would have said: hit it farther. I was wrong. Here’s what actually worked.
- The short game. Half of my practice time goes to shots inside 100 yards. That’s where most of my strokes went, and that’s where they came back.
- Fewer disasters. Going from a 10 to a 3 was mostly about turning double bogeys into bogeys and bogeys into pars. Birdies are nice. Avoiding the big number is what wins.
- Course management. I stopped trying the hero shot. Middle of the green, take your two putts, move on. My scores dropped before my swing improved.
- A coach. Well, sort of. Instagram and YouTube videos have become my swing coach.
- Keeping score honestly. Every round posted, good and bad. The handicap only works if you don’t negotiate with it.
The scorecard doesn’t negotiate
That last point matters more than it sounds. Under the World Handicap System, your index comes from the best eight of your last twenty rounds. You can’t talk your way to a lower number. You can’t get there with one great day. You get there by raising your floor, round after round, until your average good day is better than your old best day.
Business has fewer honest scorecards. Revenue can be pulled forward. Pipelines get padded. Annual reviews get softened. Golf is one of the few places in my life where the feedback is immediate, objective and completely indifferent to how hard I worked that week. I’ve come to find that clarifying.
What it taught me about business
Patience compounds. For months at a time, my handicap didn’t move at all. Then it dropped two shots in a few weeks. Improvement doesn’t arrive in a straight line, in golf or in a company. Most of my best business results looked like nothing was happening, right up until something did. Building Sinecure has been the same: years of building the platform before the acquisitions made the numbers move.
Play the next shot. The worst thing you can do after a bad hole is try to win it back on the next one. That’s how a double becomes a triple. In business, the bad quarter or the deal that fell through tempts you into the hero shot. The better move is the boring one: middle of the green, two putts, next hole.
Avoid the big number. Most companies don’t fail because they lacked a brilliant idea. They fail because of one unforced disaster: a bad hire in a critical seat, a customer concentration nobody addressed, a debt covenant that tightened at the wrong time. Managing downside is less exciting than chasing upside. It is also how you shoot lower scores.
You learn who people are in four hours. How someone handles a bad lie, keeps score, treats the caddie and talks about the shot they missed tells you more than most interviews. And along the way, you make lifelong friendships.
What’s next
I want to get to scratch. It’s a tall task, and I don’t know if I have the time to make it happen. Getting from a 3 to scratch is harder than everything that came before it. The gains are smaller and the work is more boring. That’s exactly why it’s worth doing.
Raise the floor. Avoid the big number. Play the next shot.