Why I Sucked at Golf (And What It Taught Me About Hiring)
The problem was never my expectations. It was what I was paying attention to.
I shot terribly at golf last week. By hole three, I’d already stopped keeping score. By hole five, a guy who had to be pushing 75 — shuffling more than walking, no backswing to speak of — beat me hole after hole without ever seeming to try. That’s when I understood something about hiring I’d been trying to put into words for years.
I don’t play golf. Never have. No clubs, no lessons, last time I set foot on a course was a decade ago. But I’ve watched plenty of it — a pro tournament in person 25 years back, a few bored Sunday afternoons on TV — and somewhere along the way I convinced myself I’d hit the ball straight and long a few times, like the pros do. That was the expectation I walked in with. It was wrong.
The Ego Problem
Then the 75-year-old set me straight without ever knowing he was doing it. He didn’t hit far, didn’t hit hard, didn’t do anything that looked impressive. He just put the same short, boring shot in the same spot, over and over, and quietly walked away with the hole every time. My ego did not enjoy this. I wanted to be the guy who could show up cold and still hit it well. Instead I got shown up by a guy who’d clearly done nothing but the fundamentals for fifty years.
Somewhere in there I let the ego go and just started watching the ball, checking my form, no expectations. By hole eight, I got a bogey — one stroke over par. Small win. And immediately, a new expectation showed up: beat that on hole nine. I didn’t. I missed it.
We show up with an expectation, and when we hit it we feel like we’re crushing it. Miss it and the whole day feels wasted — even though an hour earlier, a bogey on a course I’d never played would’ve counted as a win. Half the time the expectation itself is just ego wearing a disguise: we don’t only want to do well, we want to look like we were always going to.
The VP Who Skipped the Process
I watched the same thing play out in a real search a few weeks ago. We had a VP-level candidate — sharp, credentialed, exactly what the hiring manager wanted on paper. But from the first conversation, all he focused on was the outcome: the comp number, the title. He treated the interview process as a formality, did one round with the hiring manager, and stopped there. He never gave anyone internally a reason to fight for him — to push past the initial comp band, to justify the flex in title he wanted. He might have gotten everything he was asking for. People do get exactly that, when they’re excellent enough in the process that the company decides they’re worth bending for. Instead, he lost the opportunity early — focused on the score, never played the round.
Who was I to expect a good round after never really playing the game? I’d watched enough golf to think I understood it. Watching isn’t playing. No amount of wanting the outcome substitutes for putting in the unglamorous rounds nobody sees.
What This Means for Your Search
What are you expecting right now that’s putting pressure on you it doesn’t need to — a number, a title, a “yes”? Quiet it down. Focus on the process. The results show up eventually. And if they don’t, at least you didn’t spend the whole thing pissed off about a number you never controlled in the first place.