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My boss, Sam Weinman, whose name you may recognize from his award winning Low Net newsletter, is a very nice, supportive guy.

Except during a round of golf we played earlier this year, when he administered some tough love. Six months on, I’m glad he did.

Sam is probably the most avid golfer at Golf Digest, an 80s shooter with dreams of shooting in the 70s (he’s getting closer). He’s got a wily short game and a slightly scrappy long game which he’s constantly trying to fix.

It was especially scrappy the day we played, and I happened to hit the ball well. But through some combination of not caring and general sloppiness, I didn’t putt very well.

“You hit the ball too well to score like that,” he said. “You know how hard golfers like me need to work to hit the ball well, and still hit it terribly? Take it seriously, get it together.”

I hated to admit it, but I knew he was right.

That pep talk forced me to learn about what’s truly important in putting. Dr. Sasho Mackenzie, golf’s foremost biomechanist, studies exactly this.

A couple of things that don’t matter as much as you think:

• Off-center hits? Don’t fret them. With how good putter technology has gotten these days, golfers would have to miss the center of the sweet spot by about half an inch (which is essentially a full-blown yip) to miss a straight, 12-foot putt, Sasho says.

• Differences in swing path, or the direction your putter head moves during the stroke, aren’t a huge concern for Sasho either.

“You’d need to have your path plus or minus 3.5 degrees to pull your ball far enough off the start line to miss the [12-foot putt],” Sasho said on an episode of PING’s Proving Ground podcast. “The worst putters that come through my lab do not have path issues that give them plus or minus 3.5 degrees of variability. Those two things are washed out by the variability in your face angle.”

That, at the end of Sasho’s quote there, is the nugget. The changes in your putter face angle, AKA where your putterface is pointing at impact, is king. All it takes is a half a degree of misalignment to miss that straight, 12-foot putt, Sasho says.

Try this pro-approved drill

A popular way pros work on this is to use the line on the ball and place it on a line on the ground. The goal is simple: Roll the ball so the line on the ball matches the line on the ground.

It’s surprisingly fun, and really satisfying when you do it.

It’s really helped me. I don’t have hours to spend on a putting green every day, but a few minutes of this a couple of days a week gets my putting stroke dialed. Then, when I do get to the course, I have confidence my technique is where I like it. If I miss a putt, I know it’s because I misread it, not because I pushed or pulled it. It puts me into problem-solving mode, and my putter has never been better because of it.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com