Dash of Courage: Competing with The Masters

"If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens." - Fay Weldon

This week, the world's most famous golf tournament tees off. At the most famous golf course on earth: Augusta National

Perfectly manicured.
Perfectly silent.
Perfectly the same every single year.

Augusta National is the standard.
The thing every golf course in America quietly measures itself against. For most, that's a losing game before the first tee shot.

Now imagine this:
You just sold your tech company to Yahoo for $680 million. You decide to build a golf course in Georgia. Compete with Augusta or build something it could never be?

He chose the second.
He bought an old onion farm in a Georgia town of 340 people. One instruction to the course designer: throw out the rulebook.

No tee markers.
No yardages.
No par. Except for one hole listed as a par 4.5.

At Ohoopee Match Club, the winner of each hole decides where the next tee goes.
Every round is different. Par is just a suggestion.
Zebras graze the fairways.
A chef from The French Laundry roasts a whole lamb beside the final green.

Tom Brady shows up.
Bill Murray road trips in.
Rory McIlroy called it the best golf experience he's ever had.

It's now ranked #36 in America.
Not because it out-Augusta'd Augusta.
Because it refused to try.

I think about this a lot in leadership.
The leaders I've studied around the world who truly changed their industry didn't win by being better. They won by being different in a way nobody else was willing to be.

They found their onion farm.
Rewrote the rules.
Built something the market didn't know it was missing.

Augusta National perfected the existing game.
Ohoopee had the courage to ask, "What would this look like if we did it our way?"
That's not a golf question.
That's a question sitting on every leader's desk right now.

Dash of Courage
This week, stop trying to be better and try being different.
Pick one area you've been following the standard and ask:
"What would this look like if we had the courage to do it our way?"

Because the goal isn't to win someone else's game.
It's to build one only you can play.

Courage over Comfort,
Garrett