Create more at-bats

Success is a numbers game

Baseball season is starting up soon. Baseball is fun to watch on its own (especially with the new pitch clock!) but it’s also a metaphor for a great many things in life.

For instance, even the greatest hitters don’t connect with every pitch. Batting .300 is good and .400 is considered utterly fantastic. If someone only goes up to bat once, the odds of connecting aren’t that promising. But enough at-bats will eventually lead to success.

Knocking it out of the park

I was reminded of this when I was re-reading one of my favorite career books, Dorie Clark’s The Long Game: How to be a Long-term Thinker in a Short-Term World.

Dorie tells the story of how, in 2019, she set a goal to raise her profile significantly, and by all accounts she did. For instance, she was named to the Thinkers50 list of the top business thinkers in the world. Sounds great for landing clients, right?

But as she talked about in the book, she also had several other ideas that year for raising her profile. She wanted to co-author a book with a famous writer. She wanted to launch a column for one of the world’s most prominent media outlets. She wanted to speak at a particular high-profile industry conference. And land on the Thinkers50 list.

All of these were very specific goals. She thought through exactly how they might come to be, and the steps she would have to take. The last one happened. The other three did not. She wrote a proposal with the famous author…and then had him decide he needed to focus on another project instead. She wrote several pieces for the particular publication as she tried out for a columnist spot…and she didn’t get it. She applied to speak at the conference…and they never even responded.

By the time she got named to the Thinkers50 list, she had gone through a lot of rejection for the year!

So it goes. As Dorie puts it, “sometimes our bets pay off, and sometimes they don’t. We have to make them anyway. Success is about being excellent at what you do. But, inevitably, there’s a subjective element. The editor thought my writing was strong but it just wasn’t what he was looking for.”

So, says Dorie, “You have to be excellent and you need at bats. Because in the short term, you may be rejected for a million reasons that have nothing to do with you. In the long term, though, the statistics are on your side: success comes when you make enough attempts.”

More opportunities

I have definitely seen this in my own career. I’ve had a handful of articles go completely viral, which is awesome. But I’ve also written thousands of articles in my lifetime. Hopefully at least one or two would get some clicks! Many years ago, when I was trying to land a book contract to write my first time management book, I had the completely serendipitous experience of having a book editor reach out to me after seeing a book review I wrote somewhere else. He asked if I was under contract somewhere, and if not, would I want to talk ideas. I did want to talk ideas — and 168 Hours, my first time management book, was the result.

I have told that story many times, and people have said “wow, it must have been quite the book review.”

It was not. But I was writing articles daily. I didn’t know who would see my writing, but somebody was going to have to see my writing just because it was all over the place.

So, get yourself more at bats. Keep trying things. Don’t pin all your hopes on one trip to the plate because maybe the pitcher is on fire. But when you try lots of things, eventually you’re going to get a pitch that hits your sweet spot. You will knock it out of the park. And it will look like that’s what you were aiming for all along.