I always thought that the more I progressed in my career the less I would fail. And while experience does allow us to learn from our past mistakes, it’s a mistake to try to avoid failure. Failure is the price of admission with progress and you shouldn’t let trying to be right 100% of the time stop you from being right 25% of the time. A baseball player who bats .250 with 10,000 hits in their career is seen as much more successful than a player who bats 1.000 with one hit.

Being the Head Professional or GM of a Golf Club means handling a lot of responsibility. But you don’t have to wait to be promoted to take more responsibility. In fact, the more you take on yourself the more you show people you are capable of leading from the top.

Meeting members and understanding what they do for a living but in a way that is intended to find out how happy they are. Learning life lessons from people of all ages and demographics is so valuable. Use that information not as networking but as leaning to make your own path.

The gift of being a. Golf pro. Most professions have a single focus you are tying to get someone to do. Sell pants, buy insurance from you buy this house. But golf allows you to see the person and try to understand that they want and then deliver that. Are they looking for friends, a place to take their kids, or something as simple as do they need a water, or are they trying to impress their clients they are bringing out. Golf Pros develop this quick read ability over time and it’s a skill not many other professions give you.

It’s always good to “listen” to your members and what they are saying but you don’t always have to get involved. Sometimes just collecting the information as a data point to add to the list of unsolicited feedback is enough.

It’s often too late to recover when all the things that could go wrong with a club golf event do go wrong. That’s why the practice of trying to figure out all the things that could go wrong help you prepare for them in advance.

Often I find myself wasting more time worrying or getting mad about something that I either can’t control or is really not that big of a deal. What I have learned over the years is that it’s in the worry or the getting upset that you lose much more than what you lost as a result of the thing you are upset about.

Managing relationships with 100’s of members and customers is hard. And there’s actually research and history that tells us why and at what size tribes and communities start to fracture.

There are two types of advice people give when asked. What they would do in your situations and what they think you should do in your situation. They seem like the same thing but they aren’t. And knowing the difference may be the key to succeeding.

I’ve always struggled with people saying you need a 10 year plan or asking the question “where do you want to be in your career in 10 years”. In a recent episode of Masters of Scale, with Reid Hoffman, he gave his perspective on how to look at the next step in your career that I think can help a lot of people.