Time & Perspective Quote by Sam Snead

Snead’s advice has the clean, stubborn practicality of a man who made a living repeating tiny motions under pressure. “Correct one fault at a time” isn’t just coaching wisdom; it’s an argument against the modern impulse to fix your whole life in a single heroic burst. Golf punishes that impulse. Try to repair your grip, stance, tempo, and mental game all at once and you don’t get transformation, you get a new kind of inconsistency.

The intent is almost aggressively narrow: choose one flaw, isolate it, and accept the temporary discomfort of change. That last part is implied in “concentrate.” Snead is smuggling in a truth athletes learn the hard way: improvement often looks worse before it looks better. When you’re rebuilding a swing, you lose your familiar crutches. Your scores spike. Confidence wobbles. Focusing on one “fault” protects you from panic, from the temptation to abandon the process because the short-term feedback is ugly.

The subtext is also psychological. One-fault-at-a-time is a way to manage attention, which is really what competition is about. It gives the mind a single job in a moment that otherwise invites spiraling self-critique. Snead, a mid-century superstar who bridged folksy feel and professionalized training, is staking out a middle path: disciplined enough to be methodical, humble enough to admit you’re always working on something. Not perfection, just the next correction.