January 24, 2009
I had such a streak going! Since starting this blog on January 4, I hadn’t missed a single day…until yesterday. Long story short, my wife and I went out to celebrate Chinese New Year at my favorite local Chinese restaurant, the Szechuan on Main Street in downtown Johnstown. We met another couple there…Jeff, a good friend of mine from work, and his girlfriend, Kelly. During dinner, I had a few cups of champagne punch; after that, we went to my favorite local bar, Tulune’s Southside Tavern (or, as I like to call it, “The Land of a Thousand Beers”). Tulune’s is unique in Johnstown, a cool bar with umpteen imported beers, both bottled and on tap. Unfortunately for this blog, many of those beers have a high alcohol content; I only drank two last night, but they were enough, combined with the punch, to give me, shall we say, an edge. I wouldn’t have been able to blog coherently even if I’d tried…which I didn’t, because my wife and I didn’t get home till after midnight. So *boom*: I missed my first blog since the January 4 startup.
I’m not happy about this, because the whole idea here is to provide you with something fresh to read each and every day. To give you some entertainment value while working out issues, reinforcing goals and techniques (especially related to my fiction writing), and preserving a record of my life. But hey, “life rolls” happen. (Remember my previous post, in which I talked about my mentor’s term for unavoidable incidents that delay goals? He calls them “life rolls.”) The key is, to pick up where I left off two days ago and get right back in the game.
In fact, that’s kind of the key to everything, isn’t it? How many times do we get knocked down in one way or another, whether it’s due to our own imperfections or outside forces? How often do we fail to hit a target or achieve what we set out to achieve? It’s easy in those situations to say “Screw this, I give up.” To see our goals as unattainable and unimportant. But the key to succeeding in any measure in this life, I think, is to push past setbacks and start again at the next available opportunity. If you miss a blog one day, write a new post the day after that. If you miss your word count one day, hit it the next day. If you don’t get to the gym Monday as usual, get there Tuesday. See each failure as insignificant, because it is. The only thing that’s important is the long-term performance, the improvement over time, the persistence. Because that’s what makes things possible and enables the human spirit to overcome obstacles. To grow.
Often, I wish I could go back in time and teach my younger self this lesson. I could have accomplished so much and done it so much sooner if only I hadn’t been so quick to give up in the face of rejection and setbacks. If only I hadn’t let periods of discouragement last so long. One “no” was all it took back then to send me into a tailspin and knock me out of action in one way or another for months. Make that years. When what I should have been doing every time someone said “no” or I failed in some way was to pick up the ball the very next day and start running with it again.
But I can’t go back. All of us can only move forward. Apply the lessons we’ve learned to tomorrow and not dwell on the times in the past when we failed to learn them. And this is perhaps the single greatest thing I’ve learned from writing fiction and trying to break into the world of publishing: how to handle rejection. Because, brother, when you’re a writer, you get puh-lenty of it. At the current stage of my career, I get turned down on a daily basis; sometimes, I get 2 or 3 or more rejections in a single day. If I let them get to me, I’d never move forward, or my progress would fade to a snail’s pace. And man, you don’t get anywhere at that rate.
How to become a winner by learning to be a loser. That’s what the writing life is all about. That, in itself, is worth the price of admission, I’d say. Even if I don’t have best-selling novels selling like hotcakes across America, I’ve learned how to accept rejection and failure and to persist and succeed in spite of them. This carries over into all the sectors of my life: work, marriage, working out, faith, health. I’m glad I’ve learned it now instead of having to wait till I’m in my 70s or 80s and looking back at a life without any level of acceptance, satisfaction, or success.
So I’m dedicating this post to rejection and failure. And I’ll climb back into my chair tomorrow and write another one, and another the day after that. See you tomorrow!
