Two Slim Books

©2018 by John LaTorre

As I write this, I have on my desk two books. They are slim volumes, but they contain wisdom that has guided me through life. And apart from their slimness, they couldn’t be more different at first glance. One is a book on writing, and the other one is about golf … and I don’t even play golf.

First, the golf book. Back in 1955, Tommy Armour co-wrote a book How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time with Herb Graffis. It became a best seller, and is still in print today. Some have called it the best golf tutorial ever written.

Armour was a Scotsman who, in his youth, won a slew of golf tournaments and then moved to the United States to become a golf tutor. He is credited with critiquing and improving the styles of some of the twentieth century’s great players, foremost among them Babe Didrikson Zaharias and Lawson Little, as well as anybody who had $50 (around $500 in today’s money) to spend for a morning’s lesson.

What distinguished Armour’s book from most golf tutorials was that he went beyond the basics of swing and stance, and talked about the tactical aspects of the game. He wrote that, in order to achieve your best possible score, you have to embrace two principles:

1. Play the shot you’ve got the greatest chance of playing well.
2. Play the shot that makes the next shot easy.

He told the story of how he accompanied an amateur golfer around the course, dissuading him from making risky shots in favor of making safer shots, even at the possible expense of a stroke or two on a hole. The golfer ended up knocking eleven strokes off his game, to his astonishment and delight. His skills hadn’t improved, but he ended up staying out the troublesome sand traps and fairway rough that had given him so much trouble when he had played a more aggressive game.

I was never much of a golfer, but I have found ways to make those principles work in everyday life. Everybody has a set of skills that they use, and the trick is to match the skill to the task. For example, if your forte were conceptual design rather than interpersonal relations, then you would be wise to find a job that doesn’t tax your ability to get along well with people. Your best move would be to stay out of the public eye, but to hire people who are good at it and can schmooze with customers and keep peace in your company, leaving you to do the long-term planning and market analysis or whatever your skills happen to be.  I’ve seen countless business fail because the proprietors didn’t have the managerial skill sets to make them successful, however talented and adept they were at their jobs.

And as for the second principle, I offer this example, based on my experience with repairing VW buses. There are a few things that involve crawling under the bus to gain access to various things that need replacing or adjusting. You can do it without jacking up the car, but it’s a tight fit for me, particularly since I don’t have the svelte form that I had forty years ago. It takes a few more minutes to get out the jack stands, jack up the car, place the stands, and block the wheels, but it saves a great deal of fussing and annoyance, since you can see what you’re doing much more clearly, and have the space to maneuver the parts and tools that the operation involves.

Another example: I’m an amateur woodworker. When I’m doing something intricate on a piece of wood with more complicated dimensions than a two-by-four, I find it helps to make a jig to hold the wood securely so that I don’t run the risk of the work slipping during the next few steps. Sure, it’s extra work, but it makes the next few machining steps much easier, because I don’t have to worry about stabilizing the workpiece.

Instead of issuing a detailed succession of pictures to illustrate a golf stroke, Armour used only four: addressing the ball, the upswing, the downswing, and the point where the club makes contact with the ball. That’s all you need, he maintained. If you get those things right, it will inevitable that all the intervening stages will be right, too. And once you hit the ball, it’s on its way, and it doesn’t matter what you do.  The lesson I take from this is that once a thing is done, it’s over, and instead of obsessing about might have been if you’d done it a different way, you go on to the next step. You have to do some planning, but don’t over-plan or, more properly, don’t let the planning paralyze you.

How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time bears a certain resemblance to the other book, which also came out in the fifties and is also still in print: Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style. Both books were written by men who strove for economy. Both have been praised and lambasted, with most people on the side of praise, but with detractors who criticize the authors’ preemptory tone and dogmatic style. And both books will undoubtedly be around for a long, long time and find new devotees with each generation.

The Elements of Style was written and self-published by William Strunk, Jr., an English professor at Cornell University, as an aid to his students. One of those students was E. B. White, who went on to become one of the century’s best-known writers. White came across the book again in the 1950s and republished it with a few revisions; he also added an introduction and a long section called “An Approach to Style.” Strunk called it “the little book,” and little it was: my paperback copy has ninety-two pages, including the index. (Armour’s book clocks in at about twice that, but with a larger typeface and many large illustrations. My guess is that the verbiage in both books is about equal.)

Strunk stressed simplicity. One paragraph is so important that White put it in twice, in both the body of the text and in the introduction:

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects, only in outline, but that he make every word tell.”

That was a lot of words from William Strunk, but it’s good advice. It presages something that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French author and aviator, would write a few years later: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Strunk would have approved whole-heartedly.

In his introduction, White laments the many times he failed to follow this simple rule by letting an excess word slip in here and there. He’s not alone there; I’ve committed that sin more times than I care to count. Sometimes the word stays in because it improves the pacing, and other times it’s to make sure that I’m making myself understood. But sins they remain.

That’s what both books share in common: they endeavor to strip complexity from activities that are already complex enough. Success is achieved through economy: paying attention to the basics, minimizing distractions, and focusing only on what is important.

Speaking of focusing on what’s important, my reference to Saint-Exupéry reminds me of another slim book that has meant a lot to me: The Little Prince. It teaches this lesson: “One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.” It’s a different message than that of the two previous authors I’ve mentioned, but dovetails nicely with it, because it instructs you to ignore the extraneous … the stuff you don’t need, which looms large in your mind as you approach a situation … to perceive more clearly the important stuff that isn’t always visible at first glimpse.  I think that Tommy Armour and William Strunk might have agreed with that.