Avoiding ADHD Depression - I Hope

Harvey Penick was a great golf coach, probably on a par (get it?) with coaching legends like John Wooden and Dean Smith. He wrote a small book which had a red cover, entitled The Red Book, widely considered the best "how-to" book ever written about how to play this impossibly frustrating game.

The tie-in here is my belief that we need to set realistic goals, so that we don't wind up beating ourselves about the head and body for not achieving something that we should never have aimed for in the first place. This, my dears, is known as Setting Yourself Up To Fail, and it's a bitch.

So ol' Harve tells a great story about a successful pro named Tommy Armour. Seems that some duffer met Armour at a pro-am, or in a gin mill or something, and kept pestering him about how he could learn to put backspin on his approach shots. Finally, Armour had listened to enough nonsense. He asked Duffer if most of his approach shots wound up past the pin or fell short.

Duffer thought for a moment, and allowed that almost always he was short.

Armour asked the key question: "If you're always short, why the hell are you worrying about putting backspin on the ball to draw it back to the pin?"

Let's start thinking things through a little better, amigos. Unrealistic goals and poorly conceived strategies can only lead us to failure and, thence, to depression.