Try this experiment on your next range visit. Pick a flag, set up to it with full care, then lay a club down along your toe line and step behind it. For most amateurs, that club points well right of where they thought they were aiming — sometimes a full green's width right.
This matters more than almost anything happening in your swing, because aim is the cheapest improvement in golf. It costs no speed, no lessons, no rebuild — and a crooked aim quietly manufactures swing flaws that were never really there.
Why everyone aims right
It's geometry, not your eyesight. You stand beside the ball, not behind it, so your view of the target line is skewed from the start. And most golfers aim their body at the target — which is actually aiming right of it. Here's the train-tracks picture: the ball and the target sit on the outer rail; your feet stand on the inner rail. The inner rail doesn't point at the target — it runs parallel, left of it. Aim your feet at the flag and your whole setup is pointed right of parallel. Aimed right.
Then comes the expensive part. Your brain is an excellent target-finder, and mid-swing it senses the ball is headed right of the flag. So it fixes things the only way it can — by pulling across the line. Do that for a season and you've trained an out-to-in swing whose root cause was never the swing at all. Plenty of "swing flaws" are just the body solving an aim problem; when golfers film themselves for CoachVision, the setup is often the first place worth a look before any motion gets judged.
The drill — Alignment Stick Station
The fix is a station, not a thought — because aim drifts back the moment you stop checking it.
Bring two alignment sticks (or two old shafts) to every range session. Lay the first along your toe line, pointed parallel-left of your target — the inner rail of the train tracks. Lay the second perpendicular to it, marking ball position, so that stops wandering too. Step behind the station and verify the toe-line stick truly runs parallel-left of the ball-target line. Check it from behind, never from the side — the side view is the one that's been fooling you.
Spend the first 5 minutes of every session building and checking this station, then hit every ball inside it. That's the whole drill — and its power is in the repetition. You're not learning where straight is once; you're recalibrating your eyes every single visit, until a square setup finally looks square instead of feeling strangely left.
A heads-up so you don't abandon it early: correct alignment feels aimed left for the first few sessions. Trust the sticks over the feeling. The feeling is the thing being fixed.
Every shot you hit for the rest of your golfing life starts with where you're aimed. Five minutes of sticks per session is the best exchange rate you'll ever find in this game.