Vol. 2, Issue 1: A New Hope
Hello friends, if you’re receiving this, it means you signed up for my newsletter last year and received 5 relentlessly charming and informative posts and then radio silence. Am I back for good? It’s anyone’s guess.
In 2019, my son hit a free throw.
That probably seems unremarkable. And in the grand scheme of things, it was and is unremarkable. It’s nearly 4 years later and if I asked him about it now, he probably wouldn’t even remember. It was a lifetime ago for him. He’s 10 now and was 6 at the time. We live in very suburban Los Angeles now and at the time we lived in Manhattan.
My son is not super into sports. He’s big for his age and though his coordination has improved pretty significantly over the years, he’s not terribly athletic either. We tried him at soccer and he used to steal the ball from his teammates. We tried baseball and - I’ll never forget this - he got picked for a team as part of a practice game after some hitting drills and the other kids on that team were visibly upset about it. He noticed and we talked to him about it (he was mostly cool about it) and we also talk to the coaches just to say that we nearly fell apart when we saw it, but he pretty much took it stride.
These days, we have him in other sports. He does Japanese jujitsu, which has been great for his coordination and confidence. He trains with a water polo team, which has been great for his endurance. He’s generally in the middle or toward the bottom of the pack and he’s cool with it.
Because he knows. He knows he’s not the best at these types of things.
But here’s the thing: it doesn’t stop him from trying. I watch him do two hours of water polo training twice a week. And even though he’s not the best, he gets in the pool and he puts in the work. Every single time. It doesn’t necessarily matter to him if he beats anyone to the wall during laps or if he scores a goal or stops one. It doesn’t stop him from trying just as hard the next time. It makes me really proud.
What’s the point? Well, I’m not sure I wholly have one. This has been bouncing around my head for a few days, so I figured I’d put it on paper. But if I had to translate it into something in my professional life, it’s this quote:
“Nothing in this world worth having comes easy” - Dr. Bob Kelso
That means a lot of things - foremost that I wish Scrubs were still on the air. But also that if you put the work in, you typically get the result you’re looking for, even if that result wasn’t what you expected in the first place. I recognize that’s a wild oversimplificiation and I’ll never understate the role that luck has played in my life and my career. But I’ll also never dismiss the work that I’ve put in to get me places also. Life contains multitudes.
Back to that free throw. In 2019, we had my son in basketball lessons. Normal stuff - dribble here, shoot this way. Rips and jump fakes. My son did what he’s always done. he put the work in during the class, just practicing away even though he wasn’t terribly good. During the practice, the coach would make a big deal about how they would all go to get pancakes at brunch after the class. All class he talked about how after class, everyone was gonna go have a pancake brunch. The one thing that stood in the way of getting brunch was that one of the kids was picked at random and they had to hit a free throw before everyone would be released to their stack of syrupy, buttery deliciousness.
On this particular day, the ball landed with my son, who if his hit 2 shots all day, that was probably a lot. He froze for a beat. The room got stone silent. Even the other dads who were sitting on the sideline watching and had zero investment in hit or miss took their eyes off their phones for 10 seconds to see what was gonna go down.
And in another stroke that I’ll never forget, my kid pretty calmly stepped up to the line, dribbled twice with two hands and sunk it on his first try.
The place went wild and the kids swarmed my boy, who had just the biggest 6-year old smile on his face, and they tapped him on the head and they high-fived him. It’s the closest he’s going to get to being carried off the field.
Here’s a couple of things:
Catch me at Programmatic I/O next week in New York. I’ll be on stage with dear old friend Joey Trotz on Tuesday morning at 9:00am ET. If you’re interested in catching up, please reach out.
We’ve got roles open at OpenX!
I’m hoping to be here regularly, so let’s see how that goes. In the meantime, have yourselves a great week!