IN THE WIN(D)

2,359 years since a 22 year-old took on the most powerful empire the world had ever seen …and won,*

we take a look at the superpower that has raised games from Alexander to Archimedes to Arron Rai, STRATEGIC FOCUS

It’s the kind of scene you might find on any windy day on any golf course on the planet.  Weekend golfers ‘effing and blinding’ and  attacking the turf like turbo-charged JCBs in frustration. Cries of “Unfair!” “Brutal!  “Absurd!” “Ridiculous!” And telling bystanders to “Shut the f*** up!”

Only this weekend it was the cream of golf’s elite, gathered at Aronimink for the 108^th PGA Championship, and prompting the World Number One, Scottie Scheffler not Nelly Korda, to say  “This is the hardest set of pin locations I’ve seen since I’ve been on Tour, and that includes U.S. Opens and Oakmont.”

….Think Archimedes’ two years defence of Syracuse against the then World Number Two, the Roman Army, in 212-214 BC.

The mathematician-cum-engineer-cum-military-genius’s other famous catchphrase was “Give me a place to stand, and with a lever I will move the world.”  (I can’t remember the other one ATM, what was it now? Oh s***t, where did I put the soap? …Eureka!).

Last Sunday at Aronimink a wanderer from Wolverhampton moved the world, having moved up the leader day by day (16^th Day 1, 14^th Day 2, 3^rd Day 3, 1^st Day 4) and from third place (thanks to three bogeys in the first 8 holes) to winning the second Major of the year by three holes.

…and by an adherence to match strategy that has been variously described as ‘meticulous’ and  ‘obsessive.’  He is famous for ‘reading the charts,’ carefully studying the slopes and breaks on each green.  He regularly analyses his ‘launch monitor data,’ the angle of attack, spin rates and clubface control.  And because he is always the ‘David,’ to the game’s big-hitting ‘Goliath’s such as Rory McIlroy and Aldrich Potgieter, Rai relies on statistical analysis and accuracy to compensate for his lower swing-speed (not that anyone would call Rory or Aldrich “Philistines”).

Archimedes was born in Syracuse, a Greek colony in Sicily some 3,351 miles from Wolverhampton and roughly 2,282 years before Arron Rai, but even back in Archie’s day military strategy (from the Greek word for a general ‘strategos’) was studied at length and practised with breath taking (quite literally) prowess (Hannibal might have crushed Rome entirely if the folks back home in Carthage hadn’t been jealous of his successes on the European tour). But what is the secret sauce spicing-up the strategic superpower?  Drumroll please. Ta dah!

…EFs

No, not the expletives sprayed liberally around the course at Aronimink.

‘Executive Functions’ (aka ‘executive control’ or ‘cognitive control’) and described in a seminal 2013 paper* as follows:

‘Executive functions refer to a family of top-down mental processes needed when you have to concentrate and pay attention, when going on automatic or relying on intuition would be ill-advised, insufficient, or impossible. Using EFs is effortful; it is easier to continue doing what you have been than to change, it is easier to give into temptation than it is to resist it, and it is easier to go on “automatic pilot’ than to consider what to do next. There is general agreement that there are three core EFs: inhibition [inhibitory control, including self-control (behavioural inhibition) and interference control (behavioural inhibition) and interference control (selective attention and cognitive inhibition)], working memory (WM), and cognitive flexibility (also called set-shifting, mental flexibility, or mental set-shifting and closely linked to creativity). From these, higher order EFs are built such as reasoning, problem-solving, and planning. EFs are skills essential for mental and physical health; success in school and in life; and cognitive, social and psychological development.’

…and nowhere more so than golf.

But what about the other chapters of The Business of Pleasure? Those of us taking our long-shots with keyboards and cameras instead of woods and irons, microphones and Logic Pro in place of putters and sand-wedges, on stage, on canvas and the back walls of buildings in place of a 150 acres of immaculately landscaped torture. After all, a round of golf takes a few hours, a first-time novel a couple of years, and a hit-song... (I’ll let you know when I record one). So how can we possibly maintain our strategic focus when there are just so, so many distractions?

Don’t panic Mr. Mainwaring, don‘t panic!

Help is at hand in the form of a snappily entitled 2024 paper Time-varying functional connectivity predicts fluctuations in sustained attention in a serial tapping task** which corrects a widely and deeply held assumption:

‘To successfully achieve one’s goals and perform optimally in many situations, we must control and sustain our attention. Tasks requiring such attentional control can vary from the mundane, such as listening to a podcast, to highly engaging ones, such as playing basketball. Some think of attention as a light—it is either on or off, but a better metaphor is a flickering candle—even when lit, the flame varies. These fluctuations of attention can occur from moment to moment and across more lengthy time periods. Sustaining attention is a complex cognitive process that requires both top-down (e.g., knowledge-driven processes to bias subject towards signal as opposed to noise) and bottom-up control (e.g., sensory inputs such as the characteristics of the target stimulus).’

So maybe the trick is to remember that the flame is just flickering, not spluttering? 

Inspired by that thought it’s then back to the songwriting with renewed strategic focus, and within minutes I’m one line short of a great hook!

‘Like a tealight on the terrace?  

…Lantern on the mantle? 

Eureka!  …Candle in the Wind.’  

Nah, that’ll never sell

DT

*Battle of Granicus, 22 May, 334 BCE

**Executive Functions, Adele Diamond, Annual Review of Psychology, 2013

**Dolly T. Seeburger, Nan Xu, Marcus Ma, Sam Larson, Christine Godwin, Shella D. Keilholz & Eric H. Schumacher