Let it Bleed.

 

When I was a boy and harbored fresh-cut-grass dreams of playing baseball until I reached an ancient age, say 36, I read over and again a book by Ted Williams called "The Science of Hitting." Many people regard Williams as the greatest hitter of them all. Had he not lost three years as a fighter pilot during World War II, and two more as a fighter pilot during the Korean "police action," he might have broken the Babe's home run record before Henry Aaron did in the mid-1970s.

What impressed me most--no, actually awed me--about Williams was something I read about him in passing. He would take batting practice until his arms and rib-cage bled from the repeated friction of skin grating skin.

If you're a sports fan (which I'm not anymore) you'd probably have read about some dirt-court kid shooting thousands of baskets a day improving his shot. Or a runner running hundreds of lonely rain-soaked miles up rocky hills. 

If you're of a literary bent, you've heard about the writers with the discipline and rigor to write one-thousand words a day or even more. Read some early bits by Elmore Leonard on his drive to make it as a writer. He wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote some more. Two-pennies-per-word-pay and rejection did nothing to slow his slog.

Now that I run GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I've learned things I never knew when I was working for agencies I didn't own. I'm learning things while on my own that I never learned from the six creative Hall-of-Famers I've worked for.

Most of all, I've learned to gear the work you try to sell to clients to the work you're good at doing. In other words, if you're fast and prolific, sell fast and prolific. If you're brutal and foundational and that's the work you do, sell that. Don't blow with the wind and change what you do. Instead, find a way to play to your strengths.

This isn't exactly, "if all you have is a hammer"-thinking. Because of course your toolkit (to extend the metaphor) has more than one tool. But it would make no sense for me to try to write like William Makepeace Thackeray when my sensibilities are more Mickey Spillane or the great god, Chandler. 

That's one part of what I've learned along the way. The other part is a tougher lesson and harder to effect. 

Anyone can do anything some of the time. When conditions are right, when you're well-rested, in a good mood, warm, well-fed and clean and dry.

The trick to any of this is shitty days.

You know, 99 out of 100 days. Or 9,999,999 out of 10,000,000.

It's doing what you do every day. As well as you do on your best days. It's writing well, or hitting well, or being well when you're not. That's what matters. It's beating a deadline or another person you're vying against when you feel like you've been through the rinse-cycle or been driven over by a fleet of taxis with their meters running that makes the difference.

I'm not the best at anything I do. There are hundreds of people way better than I am.

What I am best at is doing what I do when I suck at it and muscling through no matter what.

What I'm best at is typing and thinking till my fingers bleed from my keyboard and I've found an answer after looking at the question eleven ways till Sunday seven days a week.

As my boxing hero, Joe Louis, once said, "I did the best I could with what I had."

That's what makes a hero.