Nov 2024
Imagine I’m having a dream in which Jackie Chan says “Stephen – try to punch me.” How close will my fist get?
Perhaps one could say “not close”, which is true – I’m incapable of landing a punch on a trained martial artist.
But one could also say “quite close” because my fist will stop only about six inches away from his face.
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I used to play a friend in ping pong. Unfortunately for him, I had played ten times more games than he had.
In order to be a good sport, I would play competitively through the course of a game up until the last moment. He could be leading 15-10 but somehow could never close out with a win. Toward the end, my shots would get a little faster, a little more precise, a little trickier to handle and that was enough.
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My son loves to color more than any other child I have ever seen. It is beautiful, as his dad, to see his artistic sensibilities develop through hours of daily practice.
Sometimes, though, he gets frustrated. The Picture he had in his head is not coming out of his colored pencil and it feels like it never will.
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When an amateur loses, they don’t know how close they were.
The art looks wrong. The job application gets rejected. The relationship goes nowhere. The business falls flat. The essay gets no attention.
School lies to us about this. A tenth grader can look at their Geometry test and know they got exactly an 82 but most meaningful challenges don’t give us anything like a grade in response. We simply come to the silent understanding that we didn’t quite make it. But by how much?
We need coaches to tell us “you’re close. Keep going.”
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You’re closer than you think.