July 5 (THEWILL) — About two weeks ago, I travelled to Canada for the Global Energy Show. Since the RBC Canadian Open was being played in nearby Toronto that same week, I seized the opportunity to attend one of Canada’s premier golf tournaments.
Like many spectators, I was particularly interested in watching the trio of Englishman Matt Fitzpatrick, Irishman Shane Lowry, and Norwegian Viktor Hovland, three of the tournament favourites. American Bud Cauley was also in the field, but he was not the player I had come to see.
Major golf tournaments are played over four days, from Thursday to Sunday. After the halfway cut, only about half the field remains, making the weekend rounds the most compelling. I was only able to attend the Saturday round before other commitments called me away. It was only later, watching the final round on television, that I fully appreciated what had unfolded.
Bud Cauley had just won his first PGA Tour title in his 240th start, after fifteen years and 239 previous tournaments without a victory.
Pause on that number for a moment.
Imagine going for 239 job interviews before finally receiving your dream job offer. Or sitting the same professional examination 239 times before you finally pass. Now imagine pitching your business to investors 239 times before hearing your first yes. By then, even your family might be gently suggesting that what you need is not another application, but spiritual deliverance.
As if that were not enough, Cauley’s journey had been interrupted by a devastating car accident that left him with broken ribs, a fractured leg and a collapsed lung, injuries that could easily have ended not only his career, but his dream.
Reflecting on his story, I realised his victory came down to something simpler than one great round or one remarkable shot: the willingness to keep showing up long after many would have given up. That, I thought, is one of golf’s greatest lessons, and quite possibly one of life’s greatest too.
While few of us will ever play on the PGA Tour, many of us will have our own version of 239 tournaments. Mine came in the early years of one of our companies. Today, Nigerian organisations are increasingly comfortable engaging local firms for international brand strategy. Fifteen to twenty years ago, that was far from the case. We believed we had a compelling vision. Many organisations did not.
Like Bud Cauley, we were still in the game, but the major breakthrough remained elusive. We earned enough from smaller assignments to keep going, yet the opportunities we truly aspired to always seemed just beyond reach. We pitched our ideas to some of Nigeria’s biggest companies, but it was the smaller organisations that placed their confidence in us. Even when the larger companies engaged us, it was usually for relatively small assignments rather than the transformational projects we had envisioned. We often joked that the big companies seemed to believe in our potential, just not enough to entrust us with their bigger budgets.
There were days when disappointment seemed to arrive more consistently than good news. Every meeting raised our hopes. Every setback tested our resolve. Looking back, I realise we were playing our own version of Bud Cauley’s 239 tournaments. Then came the phone call we had been hoping for.
Finally, we were entrusted with a major international project by an oil and gas giant that, by what I can only describe as God’s providence, believed in us. It was a major assignment, and more than that, the affirmation we had been waiting for: proof that persistence often pays dividends long after disappointment has exhausted its arguments.
That experience taught me something I have never forgotten. That is because we often misunderstand failure. We tend to think of failure as the opposite of success. History suggests otherwise. What we call failure is often an unfinished story.
Imagine if Bud Cauley had walked away after his 239th tournament. History would probably have remembered him as another talented golfer who never quite made it. Instead, those 239 tournaments became the foundation of his greatest triumph. The same pattern appears throughout history.
Thomas Edison famously conducted thousands of experiments before producing a commercially viable light bulb. James Dyson built more than 5,000 prototypes before perfecting the vacuum cleaner that transformed his company. Had they stopped one attempt earlier, they might simply have been remembered as failures. Success and failure may not be opposites at all. They read more like consecutive chapters of the same story.
One of the reasons I respect golf is that it has very little sympathy. The ball does not know whether your previous shot landed in the fairway or disappeared into the trees. It simply waits for your next decision. Many golfers do not lose a round because of one bad shot; they lose it by letting that shot dictate the next one. Life works much the same way. A failed interview can convince someone they are not good enough. So can a business setback that pushes an entrepreneur to abandon a worthwhile idea, or a disappointing result that leaves a student questioning years of hard work.
More often than not, people are remembered less for the setback than for how they respond to it. That is why the most important shot in golf is never the last one. It is always the next one.
By the time Bud Cauley lifted the trophy, the headlines celebrated a first PGA Tour victory. What they could never capture were the fifteen years of perseverance that made it possible. The same is true for many of us.
We celebrate the promotion, rarely the years of unnoticed effort behind it. The successful business gets the applause; the failed pitches, the sleepless nights and the closed doors that came before it rarely do. Every hard-won success has a story that few people ever witness.
That is why golf continues to fascinate me. Every round offers a choice. You can dwell on the last shot, or you can focus on the only one that still matters: the next one. Every story is written one next shot at a time, and I have found that to be as true in business, leadership and life as it is on the golf course.
We cannot change yesterday’s mistakes, recover its lost chances, or rewrite its disappointments. What we can do is take the next step with hope, courage and purpose. Failure, perhaps, was never the end of the story. It may simply have been preparing us for the shot that changes everything.
•The author, Meka Olowola is a sustainability and communications expert, business leader and avid golfer.
