blog

27 up, 27 down

by Tricia

So here I am on the uptown 4, and what do I see from the El? Yankee Stadium and... Yankee Stadium. The House of Ruth and its progeny, side by side, like stalwart father and son.

Here I am with a watchful eye on Joe Girardi, feeling like Joe Torre has the map of Brooklyn on his forehead and has no business out in the land of Royal Palms and Sunkist oranges - but as the line goes, I haven't been happy since the Dodgers left Brooklyn. And if Jorgito's out for the whole season, I can cancel my cable.

Baseball puts me in a state of ecstatic bliss, but it also makes me think about what makes somebody great at what he or she does. I read a quick piece from the Times the other day about what makes Alex Rodriguez so good:

Turns out, beyond his considerable natural talent, he sets goals for himself and pushes himself to meet them. He practices hard and regularly. He persists. Through the doing of these things, he improves. He discovers his strengths and weaknesses and adjusts and learns accordingly.

These are the same things that go into great research.

Great skill doesn't come in dramatic cathartic bursts, although that makes for great theater. It comes through persistence, humility, the willingness to fail and learn. Research is a skill, not unlike batting, pitching, throwing, catching.

How do you get to be great? By doing. There is no other way. You can't talk your way to Carnegie Hall, and you can't think your way into the post-season. You have to show up.
Any novelist will tell you that they threw out half a million words to arrive at the 80,000 or so that ended up in front of you for $12.95. Half a million words. Ask Henri Matisse how many canvases he went through before he got a Moroccan curtain that wouldn't make him puke.

Sometimes I'll have a client say, "Oh, look, we're making money hand over fist; there's no good reason to do anything else." On the one hand, I could see the guy's point. The asset management industry's been having a good, long run; we pull down margins unheard of in other industries, even within other parts of financial services.

On the other hand, I wondered what would happen if Johan Santana, Derek Jeter, and Albert Pujols all decided that they weren't going to show up for practice today. Because after all, their numbers are so good, even among their own peers, both on and off the field. So they'll just show up for work and do what they were doing yesterday.

How long do you think they'd last that way?

By doing nothing, you are betting that no one is doing anything either. You're betting that you're such a fast follower that even if your competitor rolled out a paradigm-shifting innovation, you could still catch up before that innovation made you irrelevant.

You're saying you'd rather react to an event than be the event.

I know the "don't fix what ain't broke" idea has its merits, but every time I walk past that giant, glaring FOR LEASE sign at the corner of Court and Pacific, I keep picturing the guys at Blockbuster sitting around huffing, "Movies by mail? Video on demand? That's idiotic! Where's my bonus?"