Frank arrives at the golf course eleven minutes before his tee time, which he considers punctual. He’s irritated that the group ahead is slow. He’s irritated that the starter rushed him to the tee. He’s irritated that his coffee was lukewarm. None of this has anything to do with golf, and all of it is now riding shotgun in his first swing. He makes a tense, lurching pass at the ball and pushes it into the right trees. “Bad warm-up,” he says. It wasn’t a bad warm-up. It was a bucket that was already full before he ever took the club back.
There’s a useful idea from risk management and project planning called a premortem. Before a project starts, instead of assuming it will go well, you deliberately imagine it has already failed, and ask why. What went wrong? What did we fail to anticipate? The value isn’t pessimism for its own sake — it’s that naming the likely failure points in advance strips them of their power to surprise you later. A problem you’ve already mentally rehearsed lands very differently than one that ambushes you.
Golf is an unusually good candidate for this, because a round is essentially four hours of small, repeated irritations that have nothing to do with your swing and everything to do with your nervous system’s capacity to absorb friction. The slow group ahead. The bad bounce. The four-putt you watched your partner make. The cart girl interrupting your pre-shot routine. None of these are really about golf, and none of them are avoidable. What’s avoidable is showing up with zero room left in the tank for them.
Picture your composure on any given day as a bucket with a fixed size. Every frustration — slow play, a bad lie, a heckling friend, your own missed three-footer — pours a little water in. The bucket doesn’t care whether the water came from something golf-related or something that happened in the parking lot before you even arrived. Once it’s full, it overflows, and the overflow shows up exactly where Frank’s did: in the next swing, the next decision, the next club selection made out of irritation instead of clarity.
A premortem for golf means doing the boring, deliberate work of pre-loading the likely frustrations before you ever reach the first tee, so they don’t arrive as ambushes. Slow play is going to happen on a Saturday morning — decide that now, not when you’re standing on the second tee fuming behind a foursome of beginners. You’re going to hit at least two or three genuinely bad shots today, for no good reason — decide that now, not in the moment when it happens and you’re tempted to spiral. Someone in your group is probably going to be slow, chatty, or oblivious to pace — decide now that this is simply Tuesday, not a personal insult.
None of this is about pretending to be calm. It’s about removing the element of surprise, because surprise is what makes a small frustration cost you a shot. When Frank’s bucket overflowed in the trees, it wasn’t really the coffee or the starter or the slow group. It was that none of those things were expected, so each one took a little bite out of the composure he needed for the thing that actually mattered: the swing in front of him.
Try it before your next round, even briefly: spend two minutes before you tee off naming the three most likely irritations of the day. Not solving them — just naming them, the way you’d name failure points in a premortem. You’re not trying to make the round frustration-free. You’re trying to make sure your bucket has room left in it when the frustrations show up, because they always do.
Frank will be back next Saturday, eleven minutes early, irritated before he’s hit a single ball. The course isn’t testing his swing nearly as much as it’s testing how full his bucket already was when he arrived.
Source: The premortem technique was developed by Gary Klein, drawing on “prospective hindsight” research by Mitchell, Russo & Pennington (1989); Gary Klein, “Performing a Project Premortem,” Harvard Business Review (2007).
