What a Cow on a Golf Course Can Teach You About Dealing With Life

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

Written by Arsh Kabra based on my notes.

Long ago, someone told me about an interesting rule in golf and that changed how I view certain things in life. Later, I learnt that that was not a real rule. But let us treat this rule as if it were real, in a thought experiment, and we’ll find that it can help deal with the unfairness of life.

(This is also available as a YouTube video, or a podcast if you prefer video/audio to text.)

Say you are playing golf. You hit your ball well, and you’re fairly certain you’re going to get to the hole below par. You’re feeling good. But as you walk from where you’ve hit the ball to where it has landed, and you discover that, in the immortal words of Kannan Gill:

There is a cow.

The apocryphal rule I heard was that if you’re unable to get the cow to move, you must treat it as though it is a part of the golf course. Just like if there was a tree, or a rock there. That’s it. It’s there, now you have to deal with it.

There is a cow. How do you cross?

When is a Cow Different from a Rock?

Put yourself in the shoes of the golfer. How do you react to this cow?

You may get annoyed. You may start to wring your hands and curse at the clouds. Or the cow if you’re not particularly religious.

Compare this to a slightly different situation: the ball landed in front of a boulder or large rock. How do you react then?

There’s nothing you can do about a rock. That’s going to be there. It’s a part of the golf course. You’re just going to have to deal with it. You move on, trying to find an angle at which to push your progress in this course.

Let’s change the scenario one final time. Let’s say that standing between your golf ball and its destiny is a human man. How do you react then?

You just tell the guy to move. He moves. End of story¹.

You see how your attitude changed depending on what is in front of you? Let us return to the cow.

What is the point of getting annoyed, of throwing a tantrum? It wastes your own energy and doesn’t get anywhere in the process. If you tried to get it to move and that failed, then it is best to be practical about it—think of it as a rock and move on with life. The problem is that your brain isn’t looking at the cow as though it’s a rock. It sees a cow that refuses to move (unlike a rock, which can’t move) and gets unhappy about the unfairness of the situation.

Who Says Life is Fair?

When I was nine years old, on a vacation away from my family, I was playing a game involving my brother and a frankly dangerous wheat-cutting apparatus. Predictably, this did not go well, and there was an accident. As a result, I do not have a right thumb. (Take a look.)

The frankly dangerous wheat-cutting apparatus that I was playing with at age 9.

When I came back home with a scab for my thumb, it was my mother’s attitude that I remember best. There was no crying over spilt milk, there was no beating around the bush. There was just the next thing. What are you going to do? This is how it was now, so we had to adapt to it. So, I eat with my left hand. I write with my right hand—using the index and middle fingers. Over the years, I just got on with practising how to work without a right thumb. And here I am now. I think things could have been rather different if my mother had started off with a different attitude.

The point isn’t that I am a stalwart bastion of the Correct Attitude™. The point is that my mother identified the situation and acted accordingly. There was nothing she could change about my thumb being gone. Because of her attitude, it never even occurred to me to be hopeless about the future. There was no use in despair. All that’s left to us is to move forward.

There’s another story that illustrates what I’m trying to get at.

I talk to a lot of young programmers. Most of them, of course, go to illustrious engineering colleges, learning from the best. I feel confident in saying that the same goes for you—the best programmers you know also probably studied programming in college. So, I imagine you’ll be as surprised as I was to learn that one of the smartest young programmers I know turned out to be a commerce student from Ratnagiri. (This was in 2012, in the pre-ChatGPT days, when we wrote code ourselves, like real men.)

When I learnt this, I had to talk to him. I called him, and I asked him how he writes code like he does. That’s when I found out that he was self-taught. He learned everything from online courses. I asked him what the hell he was doing in B.Com. He said that he fell ill around his 12th std math exam, and as a result, did not have good math scores. No math scores means no engineering college.

He could have fallen into a spiral of despair. Instead, he went to a commerce college, and while doing his B.Com., took up online courses to learn the things that his friends in Engineering colleges were supposed to be learning.

That’s not even the crazy part about this. The crazy thing is that most engineering colleges fill students’ schedules up with such mindless work that they don’t have the time to teach themselves the stuff that he learns. So, his code turned out to be better than the code of many people who actually went to college for this stuff! While he was doing a B.Com, he had a lot of free time on his hands, so he was learning this stuff properly.

This kid pulled bad cards. He fell ill on the day he was supposed to take a math exam. A math exam that he had probably been preparing for throughout his conscious life at that point. He had every right to be angered by this ungodly bad luck. Instead, he treated it like a cow sitting in front of his golf ball, stuck with it and scrapped away for as long as he could. When he emerged from the trenches, he emerged victorious.

Punches Hurt

So, what’s my point? Should we all just roll with the punches? Whenever bad things happen, do we just accept them and move on?

Well, no. There’s a nuance here. Sometimes, you do have to roll with the punches, but the truth is that punches hurt. Once in a while, you have to watch where the punches are coming from and dodge them.

On the golf course, when it was a human person, you recognised that you had the power to change the situation, and you got up and changed the situation. When it was a rock, you recognised that you had no power to change the situation, and you adapted to that lack of power.

You may know the Serenity prayer. Let’s go through it together:

Adapt to (most) things that hit you in life (they’re rocks), but change the (few) things that are within your power to change².

You need to hone the wisdom to know the difference. You need to be able to ask: Can you change the situation? Do you have that power? Is it worth spending your energy on this situation? If your answer to all of these is yes, then you must muster the strength to change it. And that doesn’t just mean make an angry social media post about the cow. You have to get up and do something.

97%³ of the things you face in life are things you probably don’t have the power to change, or aren’t worth the effort/energy. That’s a large number, of course, but you have to remember that there are 3% of things that you can change. You must remember to fight for that 3%. If you try to fight for a full 100%, you will waste a whole lot of energy, and at the end of the day, you’ll be yelling at rocks to get out of the way.

For things in the 3%, do something (not the slacktivism of whining about it on social media). For things in the 97%, stop complaining, move on with life.

There is a cow. How do you cross?

1. Or he doesn’t move, and now you are going to get into a fight about appropriateness and fairness and right vs wrong, and the golf game will probably be forgotten. This is slightly different from the scenario I’m describing, but equally instructive. Applying this idea to situations in your life is left as an exercise for the motivated reader

2. In a couple of months, I expect to write an article about the “Circle of Competence”

3. I don’t know where I picked up the 97% number from. There is, of course, no scientific basis for that number, but it gives the right idea of the relative magnitudes of the two numbers.