Golf Taught Me Everything I Know About AI (No, Really)

People look confused when I tell them that golf is why I'm good at AI. It sounds like I'm making a joke. But the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced: the skills that made me a junior golf champion at Tollygunge Club are almost exactly the skills that make someone good at working with artificial intelligence.

I'm Parikshet. I started playing golf when I was very young. I won my first major junior tournament — the Golfrade India Open 2023 in the E Boys category — at Tollygunge Club in Kolkata, in June 2023. I also won the Eastern Junior Tour Championship later that year and the Interschool Golf Championship at La Martiniere For Boys. I've spent hundreds of hours on the course, in training, thinking about a sport that rewards patience, precision, and the ability to learn from failure.

I also teach AI to kids. I created the SUPER Prompt Formula. I'm one of the youngest people to complete the UAE's 1 Million Prompters certification. And when I think about why AI came naturally to me, the honest answer is: golf taught me first.

The Feedback Loop

Here's something non-golfers don't understand about the sport. Every shot gives you information. Not just "that went left" — but specific information. The ball went left and low, meaning your clubface was closed at impact and you came over the top. Or the ball went right and high, meaning you caught it on the heel with an open face. The shot result is a data point. The question is whether you're paying attention.

Good golfers are obsessive data collectors. They track every round. They notice patterns. When I was preparing for the Eastern Junior Tour Championship, I noticed I was consistently losing strokes on bunker shots, and specifically on bunker shots where the sand was compact. That specific pattern took weeks of tracking to notice. But once I noticed it, I could actually fix it.

AI works exactly this way. When you give AI a prompt and get a bad answer, that bad answer is data. What specifically was wrong? Was the answer too general? Did it misunderstand what you meant? Did it give you the right format but the wrong content? The kids who get frustrated and give up after one bad AI answer are like golfers who walk off the course after a bad shot and never think about why it went wrong.

The kids who learn fast — at golf or at AI — are the ones who treat every result as information.

Precision Under Pressure

Golf is a sport where your mental state affects your physical performance in a way that's almost unfair. You can hit the same shot perfectly in practice and then pull it into the water in competition because you're thinking "don't go in the water." The physical skill is there. The mental pressure disrupts it.

The solution — which my golf training drilled into me — is to develop a very precise, consistent process. A pre-shot routine. The same breathing, the same visualisation, the same checkpoints before every swing, every time. The routine removes as many variables as possible. It creates a reliable channel between intention and result.

When I'm writing an AI prompt, I use a process. The SUPER formula isn't just a list of tips — it's a routine. I go through each element deliberately before I send any important prompt: Is this Specific? Have I given my Unique situation? Is the format Precise? Have I included an Example? Have I stated the Result I want? Every time. The same way I check my grip, stance, alignment, and ball position before every shot.

Processes beat talent in the long run. Golf taught me that at age eight. AI confirmed it at age ten.

Learning From What Went Wrong

At the 19th Interschool Golf Championship — which I won in the Under-8 category — I made a mistake on one hole that I still think about. I had a clear shot but tried something too ambitious, ended up in a bad position, and took an extra shot to recover. I was frustrated in the moment. But I thought about that hole for weeks afterward. I broke down every decision: what information did I have, what was I thinking, what would I do differently.

That kind of post-mortem thinking — dissecting failures not to feel bad about them but to extract lessons — is exactly what makes someone good at AI. When I asked ChatGPT about a specific Minecraft game mechanic and it gave me confident, detailed instructions that were completely wrong, my first reaction was frustration. But then I thought: why did it get this wrong? It turned out the mechanic had changed in a recent game update, and the AI's training data predated the update. It wasn't randomly wrong — it was wrong for a specific, understandable reason.

Understanding why AI fails in specific situations makes you much better at knowing when to trust it and when to double-check. Same as understanding why your shot went left makes you better at adjusting before the next one.

The Patience That No Shortcut Can Replace

Golf has no shortcuts. You cannot watch enough YouTube tutorials to become a good golfer without actually hitting balls. You cannot read about the perfect swing and then immediately have one. The only way to get better is to do it, fail, adjust, and do it again — for hundreds of hours.

Kids want AI to be a shortcut. Ask it a question, get the perfect answer, done. But that's not how it works. The way you get good at AI is by using it a lot, noticing what works and what doesn't, experimenting with different approaches, and building up an intuition for when it'll be reliable and when it'll need supervision.

That kind of patient, experimental learning is a skill golf gives you. You learn that there's no substitute for putting in the time, paying attention, and staying curious about what's going wrong and why.

What I'd Tell a Kid Starting Either One

If you're starting golf or starting to learn AI, the advice is almost the same:

• Don't get attached to results early. Focus on your process.
• Every mistake is data. Don't skip the step of understanding what went wrong.
• Be patient with the boring fundamentals. They're the only thing that builds actual skill.
• Find someone slightly better than you and pay attention to what they do differently.
• Enjoy the practice, not just the wins.

Golf gave me all of this before I ever tried AI. And when I started working with AI, it felt familiar — like a sport I already understood the rules of, even though it was completely new.

That's the connection. That's why I think they're basically the same thing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What golf tournaments has Parikshet won?

Parikshet won 1st place at the Golfrade India Open 2023 (E Boys, Tollygunge Club, Kolkata), 1st place at the Eastern Junior Tour Championship 2023, and 1st place at the 19th Interschool Golf Championship (Under-8) at La Martiniere For Boys, Kolkata.

How does golf help with learning AI?

Both require systematic thinking, learning from failure, patience, and developing a consistent process. The feedback loops in golf (every shot tells you something) are similar to the feedback loops in AI (every bad response teaches you something about how to ask better).

Is Parikshet still playing golf?

Yes. Parikshet plays golf competitively and continues to connect his golf experience to his AI teaching at KidsFunLearnClub.

What is the SUPER Prompt Formula?

Parikshet's 5-element framework for effective AI prompts: Specific, Unique (your situation), Precise (format), Example-based, Result-focused. Inspired partly by the systematic thinking golf requires.