The Challenge
I’ve talked a lot about the value of persistence and grit, about practicing and using new skills until they are a part of you. And as I’ve emphasized, some of the mega-successful people I know have achieved what they’ve achieved through sheer determina- tion. They put the success habits to use over and over and over until they were part of their DNA. And yes, practice makes per- fect. But as stated clearly by MJ, you have to be practicing the right types of things. My son is only seven years old right now, and he’s been play- ing baseball since he was three. And I must say, the practice that he’s put in has made him one heck of a little ballplayer. This previous season he went 25 for 29, and barely missed a ball in the field. Watching this evolution and the praise he gets, my daughter Breana decided that she wanted to play softball. So a year and a half ago she joined a team, not knowing anything about the game. She jumped in, practiced, and had a really solid first year. The second year, it moved to kids pitching (rather than coaches pitching). If you’ve never watched girls’ softball, you might not realize how complex the pitching motion is. There’s the wind- up, the push off, and the releasing of the ball off the hip. It’s something I still can’t do great, but am trying to learn for Bre! But three games into the second season my daughter realized, “We don’t really have one really good pitcher on our team,” and the games become very boring because of it. At their age, if a girl can’t throw a strike, the teams hit the five-run rule, and it’s off to the next inning. Sometimes it’s like watching paint dry or grass grow. Whether it was to stop the games from being boring, or to be more in the spotlight, my daughter said, “Dad, I want to pitch.” Keep in mind she’d never pitched before. I said, “The only way this can happen is if you prove to me that you really want it, and you practice—you show your grit.” So we watched a bunch of YouTube videos, we got the right format, the right form, I set up a plate behind my house, and my daughter went to work pitching every single day with me!
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