The One-Year Golf Obsession Plan (From A World Record)

He played more golf in one year than most people play in a decade.

Josh Simpson spent the last 12 months crisscrossing England, Wales, and Scotland, living in a camper van, and playing 581 different courses to set the new world record for most 18-hole rounds played in a single year.

It sounds like a wild stunt, but the story isn’t about mileage.

It’s about what happens when you center your entire life around the game, the same way we talk about in pieces like why golf feels impossible and how to enjoy it again.

A year like that forces a few things to the surface:

• What the game teaches you when there’s nowhere to hide.

• What repetition does to your mind.

• Why some people improve under volume while others break, and why others need a softer reset, like a golf mental vacation to find joy beyond par.

And there’s one lesson from his journey that matters for every amateur reading this.

If you want to take one idea from his record and bend it into a system that actually improves your game, the key isn’t what you think, and it builds on the simple frameworks we use in our most popular golf mindset and enjoyment guide.

If you care about turning stories like this into real strokes gained, the next part is where we get specific.

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🔏Paid Members Only: Building Your Own “One-Year Golf Cycle”

The world record sounds extreme, but the structure behind it is something any amateur can copy in a lighter, smarter way, the same way you might copy a routine from our simple golf tips to play better and have more fun.

Simpson didn’t just play more. He …

played with patterns that changed how he saw the game.

Here’s how to turn those patterns into a simple blueprint you can use for the next 12 months.

1. Pick A Single Skill To Anchor Your Year

Most golfers jump between fixing driver, irons, short game, putting, and swing mechanics all at once.

Simpson didn’t.

Playing hundreds of courses forces a chosen focus because chaos reveals weak spots fast.

Choose one:

• Green-reading

• Distance control with wedges

• Fairway-finder tee shot

• Lag putting

• Mental reset after mistakes, as we explored through pressure rounds in the Australian Open short putt pressure routine

Then make it the lens for your year. Everything flows from that.

2. Build Course Variety Into Your Learning

One hidden reason Simpson improved is that course variety kills comfort.

Different lies, greens, wind, slopes, and visuals sharpen instincts faster than range work ever will.

Your version:

Play one new course per month.

Not expensive. Not fancy. Just unfamiliar.

You can even plan your season around a few destinations from our best golf courses bucket list, or pick a couple of hidden gem golf courses near you.

Variety acts as a shortcut to better decision-making because it forces you to adapt instead of repeating.

3. Track One Number After Every Round

Not five numbers. Not a spreadsheet full of stats.

One number tied to your anchor skill.

Examples:

• If your anchor is wedges: average distance left to the hole inside 60 yards

• If your anchor is putting: total three-putts, especially if you are working through the stop three-putting pro secrets routine

• If your anchor is driving: the number of swings you committed to without steering

A year gets clearer when the scoreboard stays simple. You can always cross-check your progress with the ideas from why no one cares about your golf score so the numbers do not own you.

4. Build A “Reset Routine” For Days You Don’t Have It

Playing that many rounds meant Simpson had bad days all the time.

What kept him steady wasn’t a swing thought. It was a reset ritual.

Your version can be tiny:

• One deep breath behind every shot

• One clear target

• One soft rehearsal

• One committed swing

If you repeat the same reset across a year, it becomes your anchor under pressure, just like the routines we broke down in score-blind golf and how to stop counting.

5. Set A Personal Mini-Record

You don’t need 365 rounds.

But you do need a challenge that feels big enough to stretch you.

Pick one:

• 20 courses in 2025

• 50 rounds

• 100 hours of short game

• Play 9 holes every Wednesday

• Zero rounds without a game plan

A small record makes the year feel like a story, not a list of rounds, and it protects you from the golf achievement trap where winning alone will not make you happy.

6. Write A “What I Learned” Note Each Month

This is the killer step that makes the entire cycle work.

Simpson lived in a van, but he lived with awareness.

When you force yourself to summarize your month, your learning compounds.

Your monthly note only needs three lines:

1. What improved

2. What stayed the same

3. One thing to test next month

If you keep this up, you will be a different golfer by the end of the year, and when you scroll back through your notes alongside the full ParTalk archive of past issues, you will see a clear story of how your game and your mindset changed.

—Hakan | Founder, ParTalk.com, Your Weekly Golf Buddy