From TheClubHouse:
I learned Stoicism through life, not on the golf course. Work, family, health challenges and everyday chaos taught me to understand what I can control and to accept what I cannot — nothing more so than learning to deal with our daughter’s leukaemia. Golf, though, strips philosophy to its bones, exposing how ego, patience, and impulse collide on every hole. This piece explores the challenge of living Stoic principles where they’re easiest to forget.
Adapted from a post first published on ThoughtsFromTheTrain.Com in Sept ‘23
Golf has a habit of exposing things.
Weak grips.
Poor alignment.
Character flaws you were hoping had retired quietly.
You can spend hours on the range working on your swing, only to discover — somewhere around the 6th hole — that the real issue isn’t mechanical at all.
It’s emotional.
Or philosophical.
Or both.
Stoicism entered my life long before I ever set foot on a golf course. It arrived through the quiet demands of work, family, health challenges, and the unpredictable turns of daily life, teaching me to distinguish what I can control from what I cannot.
Only later did I try to bring those same principles onto the golf course. That’s when things got interesting.
What Stoicism actually asks of you
Stoicism is often misunderstood as emotional suppression — stiff upper lip, no feelings, quietly furious.
In truth, it’s far more practical than that.
Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and accidental self-help author, kept returning to one simple distinction:
Some things are within your control.
Most things aren’t.
Wisdom, according to the Stoics, lies in knowing the difference — and not wasting energy pretending otherwise.
On the golf course, this distinction is obvious.
You control:
your preparation
your decisions
your commitment
You don’t control:
the wind
the bounce
the way the your ball suddenly appears allergic to the hole
And yet golfers behave as if frustration might influence the laws of physics.
The course doesn’t owe you cooperation.
It only owes you honesty.
A Stoic golfer still wants to play well.
They just refuse to confuse effort with entitlement.
When Stoicism works in life… but not on the golf course
I can apply Stoic principles fairly well in my non-golf life.
Family challenges.
Work pressure.
Health struggles.
The things that genuinely matter.
I’m usually able to pause, separate what I can control from what I cannot, and respond with something close to calm.
Then I step onto a golf course
and lose my composure
over a small white ball refusing to behave.
It’s an odd contradiction.
In life, where the stakes are real, I’m measured.
In golf — where none of it truly matters — I’m suddenly attached to outcomes I know are outside my control.
Golf doesn’t test my philosophy.
It tests my ego.
The course bypasses intellect and goes straight for identity.
It’s not just about scoring.
It’s about what I think my score says about me.
My competence.
My progress.
My self-image.
In life, I’m often willing to accept imperfection.
On the course, I still want proof.
Ego doesn’t want control.
It wants reassurance.
And golf, being golf, offers none.
So the struggle isn’t understanding Stoicism.
It’s applying it when the ego feels threatened.
When a bad shot feels like a personal insult
rather than a neutral event.
Maybe that’s the real practice.
Not mastery.
Just awareness.
Every round is a negotiation
between patience and pride.
Bad shots are inevitable.
Bad reactions aren’t.
Every round has a moment.
A swing that feels wrong
the instant it leaves the clubface.
The real test isn’t the shot itself.
It’s what happens next.
Most rounds don’t unravel because of one mistake.
They unravel because the golfer keeps replaying it
while standing over the next ball,
dragging ego and frustration from hole to hole.
Stoicism offers an alternative:
Pause.
Acknowledge what happened.
Take the lesson — if there is one.
Let the rest go.
No emotional trial.
No internal abuse disguised as “high standards.”
Golf punishes memory.
It rewards attention.
This isn’t about pretending you don’t care.
It’s about caring enough
not to sabotage yourself.
And this is where the ego quietly reappears —
because the ego loves to replay mistakes,
as if self-criticism might retroactively improve them.
It won’t.
Forrest Gump, an accidental Stoic
Somewhere between Roman philosophy and modern golf
lies an unlikely guide: Forrest Gump.
“Life is like a box of chocolates” sounds simple.
Almost throwaway.
But it carries a deeply Stoic truth:
You don’t know what’s coming next.
Resisting that fact only makes things harder.
Forrest doesn’t overthink.
He responds.
He accepts circumstances
and acts within them.
Shot by shot.
Step by step.
That mindset translates beautifully to golf.
You don’t know if the putt will lip out.
You don’t know if the drive will catch the bunker edge.
You do know that worrying about either won’t help.
Uncertainty isn’t the problem.
Wanting certainty is.
Golf doesn’t reward prediction.
It rewards commitment to the present moment.
Which the ego struggles with —
because the ego prefers guarantees.
Final thoughts on the walk to the next tee
Golf doesn’t demand emotional numbness.
It demands emotional discipline.
Stoicism isn’t about detachment from the game — it’s about clarity within it. Learning where to invest energy, and where to let it go.
I realise, reading this back, that I’ve been circling this idea for a long time in my writing — trying to understand how the way I live off the course shows up when I’m on it. Rewriting this piece hasn’t taught me anything new so much as it’s made something clearer: that the real work isn’t learning the principles, but noticing where and why I struggle to live them.
Golf just happens to be very good at pointing that out.
Between stimulus and response there is space.
Sometimes that space is a breath.
Sometimes it’s a walk to the next ball.
Sometimes it’s the quiet recognition that my ego has taken the wheel again.
If Stoicism is about progress rather than perfection, then this — noticing, resetting, walking on — is the practice.
Tomorrow’s round will offer another chance.
It always does.
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Fantastic read. The best thing a golfer can practice is what’s going on between the ears. Golf is a long game, but the club is only in contact with the ball for a total of a couple seconds over the entire round. The rest, is a sport of mentality. Where do you allow it to take you vs where you are comfortable going. I have a piece coming out next Monday about a similar topic addressing on course focus and addressing your weaknesses on and off the course
What a great piece! Thanks so much for bringing Stoicism into golf. You really captured the key elements in a lovely way as they relate to dealing with our nonsense as golf nerds. I especially love how you note that we often deal with non-golf stuff pretty well, but when the little white ball doesn’t behave, we react like five-year-olds. thanks again.