Wait for a pitch you like

You don't have to take the first option that comes along

Summer is baseball season, and I’m hoping to make it to a Phillies game in the next few months (it’s on my Summer Fun List!)

If you watch baseball, or if your kids play baseball, you may have noticed that batters don’t swing at every pitch. Sometimes you can see a pitch coming that you just know won’t work all that well. Maybe you can see it’s high or low (good news is you get a few balls to play with). Even a single strike is OK. You can’t wait forever, or you might wind up like Casey at the Bat, striking out as he sneers at multiple pitches in a row. But it’s OK to be judicious on offerings that are just OK. A wise hitter waits for a pitch he likes.

Baseball is, of course, an ongoing metaphor for life. We, likewise, don’t have to swing at every pitch. We can wait for the ones that we suspect will connect really well.

Be patient

I can see this in my own life for sure. Last summer I was trying to figure out what my next book would be. Tranquility by Tuesday came out in October of 2022, and I generally try to be writing a new one by the time each book comes out. But I hadn’t come up with anything that seemed to work. Over the summer I came up with a number of different ideas that could be books, but nothing seemed quite big enough to justify 70,000 words and two years of my life. Finally, in October, I figured out a way to weave a lot of these different ideas together. I wrote up a proposal and sold it in April. I’m really excited to be starting on this — it was good to wait for one I liked.

“Wait for one you like” is good advice in many careers. Even if you’re ready to move on from your current job, you don’t need to take the first job offer you get. If you’re not excited about the offer and if you have reason to believe you’ll get an offer you like better eventually, you can wait.

When you’re clothes shopping, unless you literally don’t have enough clothes to make it to laundry day, you’re probably better off buying what you love and nothing else. Wait for what you like. Don’t fill your closet — and deplete your clothes budget —with items that aren’t that great. Wait for items that are just what you want or need.

Nothing is perfect, but some things are closer than others

Now, “wait for one you like” doesn’t mean wait until you find something perfect. Nothing is perfect in this world at least, and sometimes we just need to go for something reasonably good. I was recently shoe shopping with my daughter because her everyday shoes were literally falling apart. I told her we couldn’t leave the shoe store without something. It didn’t have to be perfect — it just had to be better than what she was wearing. That wasn’t a high bar to clear!

Likewise, if you’ve been meaning to get back into music, and your local community orchestra has a spot for you, even if your passion is jazz, maybe it’s worth doing the orchestra for six months or a year to try it out. In doing so, you might meet a handful of other musicians who want to form a jazz quartet with you. A reasonable thing can lead to something that’s a pitch you truly like.

But if you form that jazz quartet, and you get offered an inconvenient gig six months hence, it’s fine to turn it down. A better one is likely to come up, or several better ones, and then you’ll have more space to take them, so you can knock them out of the park.