The Writers Coin

Hope everyone is having a great holiday season. Thanks for checking out The Writer’s Coin!

To wrap up the new year, I decided to round up my five favorite posts of the year and two of my favorites from Wisebread. Hope you enjoy them and I’ll see you next year!

• Am I a Thief or an Entrepreneur?: I try to start a side business and get—ummm…sidetracked.
• The Threshold of Specificity: I coined this phrase all on my own! It’s all about how far we can go to learn something new by ourselves.
• The Importance of Having a Plan and Sticking with It: I learned a monumental lesson about sticking to the plan after running the 2009 Urbanathlon.
• The Steve Prefontaine Guide to Getting Rich: Never heard of Steve Prefontaine? He was a long distance runner that can make you rich.
• 3 Ways Viktor Frankl Inspired Me to Deal With Adversity: One of my favorite posts of all time. Frankl and his book positively inspired me in a whole new way.

And from Wisebread:

• Do What You Love: Is this idealistic nonsense or practical advice?
• Buying a Home Without the Money: The most comments I’ve ever gotten on any post I’ve ever written.

I have a plain manila folder on my desk that’s stuffed with 76 pieces of paper. They are all from different parts of the country. They are of all kinds of different sizes but they all have one thing in common.

Each one is a badge of failure.

The folder’s front cover reads “Rejections” and I’ve been adding to it over a four-year span.

How it Works

When I write a story or an essay I think is interesting, I polish it up, have someone I trust read it, and then I go over it again once last time.

In all, this probably takes a couple of months.

Then I stick it into an envelope with a SASE or I submit it online and wait. A month or so later I get the self addressed stamped envelope I made out to myself a couple of months ago and open it up. It’s magical—like mailing yourself a letter from the past.

They say things like:

• Thanks but no thanks
• We liked it but didn’t have room for it
• We didn’t even read it because we’re so busy
• Please try again sometime
• The intern didn’t like it or didn’t “get it”
• People like you are what make this publication possible

In the end, they all mean the same thing: I failed.

My attempts at getting published have been foiled a total of 76 times (multiple times for the same story). I had relegated this rejection folder to the bottom of a pile of papers in my night stand until I caught a glimpse of it the other day.

Wow, I thought, I haven’t opened this up in a LONG time.

And it hit me: I haven’t added to it in over two years—I haven’t failed in over two.

I’m disappointed.

Failure to Fail

Without putting myself out there, I’m not going to fail. Sure, that’s technically right. But it also means I’m not even trying.

It’s like a baseball player that goes up to the plate and doesn’t take his bat off his shoulder. Sure, you might get a walk every now and then, but your batting average will always be zero.

Boring and lame.

After seeing the folder and realizing how long it’s been since I’ve failed, I feel motivated to add more rejection slips to it.

If I’m going to fail, I’m going to grip that bat as hard as I can, step towards the pitcher, and swing as hard as I can.

I may whiff a 77nd time, but I’ll go down swinging.

You remember Archimedes of Syracuse, eh? The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present he’s received is actually solid gold. Unsolved problem at the time. It tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks — insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on end. Finally, his equally exhausted wife — she’s forced to share a bed with this genius — convinces him to take a bath to relax. While he’s entering the tub, Archimedes notices the bath water rise. Displacement, a way to determine volume, and that’s a way to determine density — weight over volume. And thus, Archimedes solves the problem. He screams “Eureka” and he is so overwhelmed he runs dripping naked through the streets to the king’s palace to report his discovery.
“Go home Max, and you take a bath.”
—Sol Robeson, from this scene in Pi

In this scene from Pi, Sol is trying to give Max some advice that might help him solve this impossibly complex mathematical problem he’s trying to crack: predicting the stock market with mathematical precision.

Max has been obsessing over it for days, he’s starting to lose his mind, and he’s on the edge of burning out.

Sol tells him to relax and take a bath, like Archimedes did when he was in the middle of his problem.

Our day-to-day foils may not sound as exciting as figuring out if a golden present is real or if the stock market can be “cracked,” but every one of us has obsessed over something we don’t want to let go until we solve it.

Whether it’s finally beating a boss in a video game or getting a piece of code to run just right—we attack some things with a ferocity that won’t allow us to put them down until they’re done.

And that’s great—persistence is a great quality.

But there is a fine line between being persistent and becoming obsessed. The further you cross over that line, the less likely you are to achieve your goal.

So next time you’re feeling obsessed, don’t forget to take a bath.

If you still don’t believe me, check out what science has to say about it.

There are a few hard-coded rules in the world of blogging that you’ve probably heard over and over. Among them:

• Create content people want
• Comment on other blogs to get the word out
• Guest post on other blogs to get more exposure
• Don’t overwhelm your audience with ads: you could alienate them

I’m good with the first three, but I also believe the first one kicks the last one’s ass.

If you own a site with content people really want, it doesn’t matter how many ads you put up or how many hoops you ask your readers to go through to get to it.

If the content is good enough, they’ll do whatever it takes—I speak from experience.

Case in point: The Baseball Cube.

I’m a huge baseball fan, and a few years ago I stumbled onto The Baseball Cube, a site that devotes itself to compiling baseball stats for every player in baseball.

Nothing special, right? Wrong. The Cube compiles minor-league data, college-ball stats, and even international league numbers for any player you can think of.

Alfonso Soriano’s numbers in Japan before he played in the minors with the Yankees? Gott’em.

Hideo Nomo’s Japan stats before he came to the US? Check. (FYI: he won 18 games in ’92)

The site even collects salary data, coaching data, scouting data, etc. Anything you could possibly think of that’s related to the game of baseball is all in one convenient place. To stat nerds like myself, this is the kind of stuff we drool over.

Although some would say “convenient” is a stretch.

When I found the site I couldn’t believe it: it wasn’t ESPN or Yahoo Sports who put it together, it was some guy with a website and an idea. I started posting about it everywhere until I got a nasty response because I was linking to a site that was “way too ad heavy.”

Which is true, The Baseball Cube has TONS of ads. Sometimes you get one of those “He married her!?” ads that are so annoying and force you to wait five seconds before taking you to your page.

It’s not only ad heavy, it’s ad-centric.

And you know what? I don’t give a crap.

Good for Gary, the guy behind the site. After all the hard work he did to get all this data together, he should make some money off it.

I’ll still keep going every time I want to find out more about a player, regardless of the army of ads on his site.

He’s hosting the information I want and can’t get anywhere else. Baseball Reference has a much “cleaner” look but I don’t like it as much. And no amount of ads or crazy interstitials will keep me from hitting the site when I want the information I want.

When you think about it: that’s the secret to any business, blogging included: create stuff other people desperately want.

If it’s good enough, they’ll show up no matter what.

Click here to read my interview with Gary, the man behind The Baseball Cube. Also check out this post about advertising and trust first got me thinking about this subject, so I figured I’d share it.