It's Easy!

Back in my old baseball playing days, I spent my 10,000 hours sitting on a rickety bench in the dugout or across the aisle of a 32-year-old American bus from my wise manager. We climbed up through the top-less mountains--like the topless towers of Ilium, or we'd find ourselves in the happy, well-lit kitchen talking to my real father in life, the Mexican Double-Hall-of-Famer (for playing and managing) Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla, aka Hector Quesadilla.

I learned more sitting alongside Hector and just listening than you could learn from a thousand years of MBA school, or graduate school in English and Comparative Literature. In grad school some intellect had read Moby Dick so intently he decided it was no longer about whales and whaling at all and god and rage, but about how Queequeg and Ishmael were closeted homosexuals. Somehow this wise-fool knew how to read into something writ a century earlier with Nantucket brack in the writer's veins.

I learned that most things in life are easy until they're not. Most things in life can be done by anyone, until they can't. Most things in life fix themselves until they don't.

"Managing a baseball team is easy," Hector would say, "when your pitchers are throwing aspirin pills, not grapefruit, when your power is on and you're up 11-3 in the ninth."

"Yes," I silented.

"Managing a baseball team is easy," Hector would say, "when you can keep the ten guys who hate you away from the fifteen who are undecided."

Again.

"Everything is easy," Hector would recite, "until it is hard. Being in love with a dark-eyed woman is easy, until it is not. Paying your bills is easy until two are due at once or three. Even being a child is easy when your father isn't drunk and working on his aim."

I have lost three or eleven major people in my life. Three or eleven major people who are no longer with me but who are with me every day. 

Hector might be five of them.

I think about those words, "everything is easy, until it is hard," almost every day.

Most people stop at the comma.

Their Unsinkable Molly Brown-ness stops before reality sets in. 

In the rush to replace humans with technology, the doyens of Selfish-con Valley believe AI can do it. You can see this in every airport in amerika when it snows. Eight days out of ten, apps can handle people who need to rebook flights in a hurry. When in snows, it is hard, and they can't.

I saw this in the operating room when I was having my cataracts removed by a skilled doctor with a laser beam. There was another doctor there, an anesthesiologist, who did nothing. She smiled and stood next to me as I was being en-surgeoned. 

"That has to be the easiest job in the world," I thought while in that anesthesia haze. And it is. Until, heaven forfend, something goes wrong. A heart-rate drops or blood pressure rises or something doesn't behave as you wish it would, or predictably.

H, who helps me run my business and whom I've loved since the 1990s, is beginning to understand.

She sees my phone ringing. She sees people calling to buy my services. She sees clients applauding after I present.

That's all very easy.

Until the phone doesn't ring. Until my prices are too high. Until the applause withers away.

Everything is easy, until it is hard.

When it is hard is when you have to get smart. 

When it is hard is when you have double-down.

When it is hard is when you have do things you'd rather not.

When it is hard is when you have is when you have to do what is hardest of all--fend off doubt, fear, self-rebuke if not self-hate.

The marzipan-complected men who run the advertising business thought it was easy. They made easy, expedient decisions and skimmed millions off the top of once-steady cash-flows. 

It was easy.

Now it's hard.

The cash-flow has stopped flowing.

Their three-piece suits are riding up.

When it's hard only a few can do as Hector did. 

Put in Abreu for Bustamante on a hunch. Start Efren Medrano, not his craftier brother, Leo. Rest Issy Buentello though he's lashing the ball and put in the 43-year-old Sisto. 

When it's hard, you think, you take chances, you try something never tried before. You try. You don't try the tried.

When it's easy, anyone can do it.

When it's hard, 646-823-7165.