Everyone deserves second chances in life. And everyone is a work in progress. Those are the big lessons for me after watching Tiger Woods win The Masters today.
It took me a long time to learn to like golf. It’s a frustrating game that requires a terrible amount of patience. But as I get older it dawns on me – golf is a lot like life in that you spend huge amounts of time waiting to become average at something only to get glimmers of hope bunched in with persistent disappointments. And that’s what golf is – the ultimate game of second chances and work in progress.
Even the very best athletes in the sport are not immune to this. They are persistently challenged mentally and physically. Perhaps more so mentally than physically which is another aspect of golf that makes it such an interesting game. And that’s the part that makes Tiger’s win that much more impressive.
Tiger was exposed as an imperfect person when his scandal broke. And it broke him mentally. And then physically. But here he is having worked so hard for so long to get a second chance. Despite always having been the best golfer in the world he was also always a work in progress. Just like the rest of us. And that’s such an important thing to remember – not just that life is a work in progress, but that we need to give people second chances precisely because we’re works in progress.
NB – The obvious investing corollary here is that good investing is always the process of incremental progress by learning from mistakes and getting second, third and fourth changes all along the way.
