We need a montage
I have won over 1000 games of solitaire.
Now you're either
thinking:
"that dude is good at
solitaire" or "he needs a different game on his
phone".
I play it when I'm overworked and
I need to turn my brain off. I used to think I was really good at solitaire
until I got a version which keeps stats. You would think I was really good too
unless you saw the second line in my stats that shows I've lost 3000
games.
OK, I know, it's a lot of
solitaire. My phone has wear marks on my screen where the cards are. Granted,
it's an old treo 600 that I've had since they were cutting edge technology but
still...
So here's the real point of
this post. When we see people's work or art or music or olympic performance, we
are seeing the 1000 games of solitaire they won. We don't see the games lost,
the discarded art or the hours and hours of practice that went towards making
something good into something amazing. All we see is the end product. It seems
to spring out of an incredibly talented person fully formed, like point A to
point B was just a step. But the truth is, almost everyone who got somewhere
worthwhile put in a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get there. We just don't
see it. In the words of Trey Parker, when you need to get real good at
something real fast, you need a montage. Sadly in the real world, the montage
runs in real time.
It's like the old joke
about the man asking for directions:, "How do you get to carnegie
hall?"
Practice.
Write
your bad songs, shoot your bad shots, make your mistakes, put your time in, do
the work so that when your moment comes and the world is watching, you have your
good songs, your clean shots and your game is effortless. Remember, somewhere,
your competition, is not taking the night off. They are doing their montage.
Are you doing yours?
Posted: Fri - October 3, 2008 at 12:11 AM
