I recently had lunch with a pastor from my old church and I asked him about how he teaches and preaches. I’ll never forget his answer, and I think about it every time I enter into a big project. “Kyle,” he started, “I’m not a dynamic speaker like a lot of other folks you’ve experienced. So instead I have to just get the text all over me before I teach or preach.”
What tremendous instruction, and I thought about it recently when I was reading Dream Golf about the making of Bandon Dunes. Mike Keiser, who started Bandon, tasked Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw with building his third golf course, and here’s how they went about it.
How it works for Bill and Ben is this: They get out on the site and start walking. Their entire design process depends on coming to know a site, every last inch of it. Their crew members sometimes move around a site on vehicles, but Bill and Ben have an unspoken rule that they will walk everywhere. They don’t want to miss a single thing. They walk and look, pause, mull over some detail, discuss it, and start walking again. When Mike was in Oregon, he walked with them, and it wasn’t easy to keep up with him and Bill and Ben. Neither rain nor sleet nor cold nor mud kept them from walking Bandon Trails from one end to the other, and I came to realize that this is what happens every day.
Dream Golf: The Making of Bandon Dunes by Stephen Goodwin
Obsession with craft, it seems, is the lone path to success. That can be (and often is) done in a healthy way, but it’s certainly a treacherous tightrope. As much as I don’t want this to be true — as much as I desire to dip my toe in many waters simultaneously — I’m afraid the true path to success on knowing every last inch of something, of getting it all over you.