Live the Break
A leadership lesson from the PGA Tour
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If you’re a golf fan, you will recognize the name, Scottie Scheffler.
If you don’t know the name, let me tell you his story, as it sets the stage for this week’s Black Belt Leadership insight.
Scottie Scheffler’s interest in golf began at the age of 3 when his parents bought him a set of plastic clubs. He hit ping pong balls in the house, learning to curve them from one room to the next. His family relocated to Dallas when Scottie was six, and they borrowed $50,000 to join the Royal Oaks Country Club so their son could pursue his love of golf.
As a teenager, Scottie Scheffler attended Highland Park High School where he won three consecutive individual state titles between 2012 and 2014. Following his 2013 U.S. Junior Amateur Championship win, he was ranked the nation’s top junior golfer in 2014. (He won 75 times on the PGA Junior Circuit.)
Scheffler was recruited to play golf at the University of Texas at Austin in 2014 and was named the “Phil Mickelson Freshman of the Year” in 2015. He helped the Texas Longhorns men’s golf team win three Big 12 Championships and was part of the U.S. Team that won the Walker Cup in 2017.
After graduating in 2018 he joined the Korn Ferry Tour (a circuit for aspiring golf pros), where he dominated the circuit, leading the tour’s playoff in points. As a result, he was honored with Korn Ferry Player of the Year and Rooke of the Year awards.
He joined the PGA Tour in 2020.
Since joining the PGA, he has racked up 13 career wins and is currently ranked as the #1 golfer in the 2024 Official World Golf Rankings. Scheffler also holds the #1 slot in the FedEx World Golf Rankings. He’s won The Memorial, The Players twice (2023 and 2024), and The Masters twice (2022 and 2024). Scottie also earned a Gold Medal in the 2024 Olympics.
He just capped off a memorable season by winning the Fed Ex 2024 Tour Championship, his seventh win in 2024, setting a new record as the lowest average score per round in PGA history, 68 strokes per round, in the process.
With an incredible seven wins on the PGA Tour in 2024, he established his dominance on the Tour. His peers refer to him as “Mr. Consistent.” Scheffler is one of the most durable players in the game today, and his touch around the greens is remarkable. His ability to remain composed and focused under pressure remains one of the highlights of his illustrious career.
But, have you heard of Randy Smith?
Randy Smith is a PGA teaching professional, currently the head pro at Royal Oaks Country Club. He has won more PGA of America national awards than any other professional, racking up 18 career wins. Smith is one of only two people to ever be named both PGA of America Professional of the Year (1996) and PGA of America Teacher of the Year (2022). In 2005, he was inducted into the PGA of America’s Hall of Fame.
Smith is renowned as one of America’s Top 50 Best Teachers by Golf Digest and is a member of the prestigious Top 100 Teachers by Golf Magazine. He has coached several notable PGA Tour professionals, among them (you guessed it) Scottie Scheffler, whom he has coached since the ripe young age of six.
One of Randy Smith’s notable instructions to Scheffler on the putting green was simple, yet profound:
“See the break. Believe the break. Live the break.”
The putting surfaces, known as greens, come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and grasses. Bentgrass, Fescue, Bermuda, and Poa annua are among the most common. A putting green can have more than 10,000 individual plants per square foot. That’s more than 50 million plants on an average-sized putting green.
Grass grows in various directions (known as grain), which affects the ball as it rolls toward the hole. Many greens are sloped and have undulations that also affect the ball’s travel as it moves across the surface of the green. Wind and temperature also affect the movement of golf balls on a putting surface. That’s part of the challenge of playing the game of golf.
Coach Smith’s advice is simple. It’s a three-step process he teaches to help his students perform better on the green, sinking more putts, and putting up lower scores. (If you’re not a golfer, the lowest score wins.)
“See the break. Believe the break. Live the break.”
William of Ockham was a 14th-century monk and philosopher known for his razor-like logic. He’s best known for Occam’s Razor, basically:
When facing competing explanations. and having
examined all possible outcomes, the simplest
solution is likely the correct one.
The U.S. Navy teaches this as the K.I.S.S. Principle, “Keep it simple, stupid.” Medical students are also trained to start with what’s obvious. For example, if a patient has a stuffy nose, it’s more likely a cold than pneumonia. It’s essentially basic probability theory.
Simply put, if you find yourself in Jurrasic Park and you hear the rumbling of dinosaurs approaching, you don’t take the time to figure out who or what is coming, you run for cover.
In leadership, and in life, the simplest solution is often the best one.
Randy Smith’s instruction to his students is based, in part, on Occam’s Razor.
Coach Smith teaches his students to first see what’s obvious: the direction of the grass, the undulations of the surface, and the slope of the green. Then evaluate the wind and temperature and how it will affect the ball’s roll or speed. He then instructs them to believe what they see, allowing them to stroke the ball with confidence.
Why? Because as I teach in Black Belt Leadership 101:
“You cannot achieve what you do not believe.”
After seeing the break, and believing the break, Coach Smith tells his students to live the break. He’s essentially telling his pupils to trust their training and instincts. Own the decision, and act accordingly. Having seen the break, believing it’s the proper path to the hole, start the ball on the right path (with the right speed) so it follows the break to the hole.
There’s a leadership lesson here.
Successful people “live the break.” They follow a similar decision-making process to what Coach Smith teaches his golf students. Three simple steps that lead to success:
See the break.
Believe the break.
Live the break.
Let’s break this down.
Seeing the break is doing your research. It’s doing your homework, and evaluating any (and all) the available options to determine the best course of action. This helps you better understand what needs to be done and consider various ways to accomplish it. It also allows you to collect the information needed to weigh the impact of each option being considered to evaluate the pros and cons.
Believing the break is about having confidence in your decision. Once you’ve done your research and weighed your options, you are now in a position to choose among the various alternatives being considered. Weighing the pros and cons helps you narrow the decision down to the outcome that has the best opportunity for success.
Living the break is about having confidence in your belief and acting accordingly. It’s about no second-guessing. You don’t overthink it. Having seen the path to success, you take decisive action and trust your decision. You’ve done your homework, evaluated your options, and now you’ve decided on a course of action. Trust your training and act.
Living the break is owning your decision.
You strike the ball having confidence it’s going to drop into the hole.
What happens when you start second-guessing your decisions?
Your thinking becomes cluttered and distracted, and your stress levels elevate. Your body tenses up, and it can’t perform at optimum efficiency. As a result, you hesitate, or (at best) you make a half-hearted effort. You’re tentative in your actions, not fully committing.
When you take unconfident action, it shows. Those around you, especially those you’re leading or supporting, can see it. It diminishes your leadership in their eyes.
You strike the ball and leave it short of the hole.
Living the break means owning the outcome. You’ve looked the situation over, determined the best course of action, and you’ve come up with an action plan to move forward. Based on the information available, you believe this is the best decision possible. Now you’ve got to own that decision.
Whether the ball goes in the hole, stops a few inches short, or rolls two feet past the hole, you own the decision and the outcome. Living the break means you’re going to own the outcome.
If it’s a great outcome, you choose well. You file that choice away to refer back to when you face a similar decision in the future. If it’s a good decision, you are grateful for the outcome but you reflect on how you could improve upon it in the future. If it’s a bad decision, you accept it, learn from it, and file it away as something that didn’t work in this situation.
Black Belt Leaders take decisive action, and they live with the consequences. They celebrate the wins even as they look for ways to improve upon their success. They acknowledge and own their failures, even as they look for ways to learn from those failures so they don’t repeat them in the future.
Black Belt Leaders see the break. They do their homework.
Black Belt Leaders believe the break. They trust their decision to be correct.
Black Belt Leaders live the break. They take confident action and own the outcome.
Let me leave you with a quote from Norman Vincent Peale:
“Believe in yourself. Have faith in your abilities.
Without a humble but reasonable confidence in
your own powers, you cannot be successful or happy.”
See the Break. Believe the Break. Live the Break.
This is how you score more Wins in life.
One more thing…
If Scottie Scheffler needed (and still needs) a coach to not only get him to the #1 ranking in golf but keep him there, how do you think you can become a World Class Black Belt Master of Who You Are and What You Do if you, too, don’t have a Coach?
In the immortal words of Tom Landry:
“A coach is someone who tells you what you
don’t want to hear, who has you see
what you don’t want to see,
so you can become who you
have always known you could be.”
Who is your Randy Smith, teaching you to see the break, believe the break, and live the break? If you don’t have one, you need one. After all, if you’re not investing in yourself, how can you expect other people to invest in you?