A Million Ways
Go write. And please don’t try to get it right. Just write. Because trying to do it the way you think it’s supposed to be done just gets in the way.
The daily practice of writing is a foundational habit loads of successful people share. Daily writing grounds busy minds. It serves as a conveyor belt for sorting thoughts and feelings. It leads people out of corners they have backed or worked their way into by revealing doors and windows they weren’t aware were there. And yet just as many folks who do write don’t because they think they don’t know how.
How is not the point. There are a million ways.
Retrieved from https://www.azquotes.com/
Unfortunately, we live in a “right-way” “wrong-way” world. Especially in business where lots of zeroes follow dollar signs and organizational charts rule the day. We want to know-- for sure-- how to get from here to there. Discover-as-you-go feels like unnecessary gambling. We are way more comfortable with an outline to follow where sequential steps lead to levels with other sequential steps that lead to other levels until prowess is attained. A linear pathway is the road of preference to get to the Promised Land. And we get anxious if the stepping stones are not laid out for us to see.
But straight lines don’t account for differences in people or the jagged nature of terrain.
“The way is made by walking,” the poet Antonio Machado once famously said. So much of what makes us good at anything worth being good at is what we can only learn as we go. And what we do with what we discover depends on our unique DNA. The footprints of success leave clues we’d be wise to stay attentive to, but we must walk in our own way.
That means embracing uncertainty. And leaning in to curiosity. And placing awareness at the top of our list of things to do. Context is ever-changing--as are we and those around us—so fool-proof plans (though they’re something we hunger and thirst for) are typically anything but. Recipes just don’t exist for all things. There’s not a secret combination that opens up the vault. Pursuits like writing, drawing, and building—leading, parenting, and loving —don’t come with color-by-number guides. Good ideas abound but there is no formula for getting it “right.” The process is messy. It just is. And though squinting and groping sometimes feel haphazard, they make up a part of the way.
I used to tell my players that beautiful offense was the result of continuous decisions. Decisions based on a context that was constantly in flux. Defense was rule based. But offense—at least the freeing kind of motion we liked to play—was principle based. And while core concepts always served as anchors, what a player at any and every moment in time decided to do depended on all kinds of things--where she was on the floor…where the ball was...where her defender was…where the other defenders were…where her teammates were. These all factored in to what she did and when she did it. What made a possession work hinged on a bevy of unpredictable things she had to sense at the time.
That meant the “how” was not a blueprint you could memorize or rinse and repeat.
And it made some of our players crazy.
For those who needed to be “right” it felt like a torture chamber void of any snatch-able absolutes. Questions without clear-cut answers made them nervous. They craved to “know the way.” And yet the ones most afraid of the dark would be the first to tell you that the best basketball we ever played was the result of figuring out the moments as they came.
At a recent country music awards show, Blake Shelton performed Toby Keith’s blockbuster single “Who’s Your Daddy?” as part of a tribute honoring the legend who was receiving the first ever People’s Choice Icon Award. Shelton’s rendition of the hit single was spot on. True to form and fashion. Exquisitely done. I can’t imagine how he-- or anybody else for that matter-- could have done it any better. But it wasn’t Toby Keith. That bourbon-smooth vibrato only comes from one set of chords.
That’s what makes a star a star. A leader a leader, a writer a writer, a mom a mom, and a dad a dad. What can’t be written down on paper and copied to a T is what makes a thing work in the end. We are the variable. We are the part that can’t be taught but must be constantly rediscovered. We are the connector of the proven dots. Dots that can be strung together in at least a million ways.
P.S. Dead Poet Society