Last week was about being focused on continually improving your craft.  This week is about playing cornhole and making 1 change to improve your craft.

Every year I go on a fishing trip with my dad, brother, uncle, and cousins, and we play a lot of cornhole aka bags.  In case you’ve never played, the goal is to throw the bags and get them into the hole (for 3 points) or onto the board (for 1 point).  The first team to score 21 without going over wins.  Historically, I’ve not been great at cornhole, because I was wildly inconsistent.  Most of the time I struggled to consistently make it onto the board.  This finally changed this year.  I started out being really off, which was obviously pretty frustrating.  I tried to solve this problem by changing a lot of things at the same time.  I tried different combinations of steps/no steps, throwing motions, changing how hard I was throwing, etc.

Making all those changes didn’t help.  Finally, I realized my issue.  I was holding the bags with my thumb on top of them and for some reason this often caused me to twist my wrist when throwing.  The wrist twisting motion made my throw unpredictable.  After diagnosing this, I realized I didn’t need to change a lot of things at the same time.  I needed to make ONE meaningful adjustment, so I changed my grip.  I started holding the bags in my palm without my thumb ever touching them.  This motion stopped me from turning my wrist over so often.  The result is I got to the point where I could at least consistently get the bags on the board.  I’m still not great at cornhole, but that one small change made me SUBSTANTIALLY better. 

What does this have to do with mastering a craft?  Often when trying to master something, I look at all the ways I am deficient and try to work on them all at once.  Do you ever do that?  This tends to lead to more and more frustration, because things often don’t get better.  Over time I’ve realized that usually if I could focus all of my effort on the right thing, then making 1 key change would have a tremendous impact.  Similar to cornhole, once I focused on fixing my grip, everything else got better.  Now that I’m consistent with my grip, I can work on doing other things.

The challenge: Take a moment to reflect on your craft.  What is one change you could make that would have a meaningful impact on improving your craft?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry