Bartolo Colón is my inspiration, and not just because I'm an old fat guy. (Bartolo is a few years older than me. I make up for it by being fatter.)
Why? Because he knows the value of just going out there and throwing strikes.
Here's a man who, from 1998 to 2005, was one of the best pitchers ever to play baseball. He made the late-90s Cleveland team terrifying to face, finished in the top 10 in strikeouts four times, and won a Cy Young award in 2005. He had overpowering stuff, and a fearsome fastball.
And then he tore his rotator cuff.
It could have been easy to consider his baseball career over. In fact, Bartolo at one point seemed to consider his baseball career over. In 2008 he left the Red Sox mid-season to deal with unspecified personal issues, and then decided not to come back. It looked like he was done.
But after surgery in the off-season, and another in 2010, Colón reinvented himself. He came back not as a high-skill pitcher who could dominate hitters, but as a veteran who understood that domination wasn't the only road to success. And now, at 45, he's still doing it.
What the older Colón understands is something that I've been learning at the same time: if you continually put in the work, sometimes good things will happen. Throwing the best pitch isn't essential; what's essential is that you keep throwing good pitches, over and over again. Colón goes out there and throws strikes - he led the league in fewest walks per inning in 2015 and 2016 - and good things happen to him. Not always, not even as often as they did when his arm was young. But often enough that he's still a productive baseball player at the highest level at 45 years old.
As I age, I find a great deal of hope in that. As a young man, it was easy to imagine myself doing the best work, and often imagining doing the best work got in the way of doing any work at all. My best skill in my twenties was getting in my own way. I was pretty great at that.
In my thirties, things have changed. I understand the value now of going out and doing the work as well as I can in the moment, and not worrying too much about whether the results are great. And as I do this, I'm ending up with much more work I can be proud of than I ever did when I was trying to be great.
In fact, I'm almost drowning in it. I've always dealt with creative blocks by doing a large number of different things in hopes that one would be working at any given time, which was a hack but usually one with some degree of success. As I've learned to throw more and more strikes, I've gotten more productive at each of those things. Now, as I approach 40 myself, many of them are working for me at the same time.
As I've been writing this post, I've also figured out the next scene in a novel I'm working on. After I write that down, I'm going to make a drawing for a print exchange I need to do this week, and then I'll head to the studio to print it, and also finish up a large animal print I started on Saturday. And then I'll have to figure out lunch, because that's the kind of morning throwing strikes has brought me.
I see a lot of my twenty-something self in the cryptocurrency community. Cryptos are the greatest, or they're awful, depending entirely on which way the market is moving today. If you're actively trading, maybe it makes sense to be obsessed with the market on some level. But for most of us participating in the community, whether BTC or STEEM are moving today isn't as important as we're making it.
It's more important that we keep on doing the things we're doing to grow and improve the community, to build on the basic blockchain systems, to help people understand that cryptocurrencies are about more than just fluctuation. Maybe for you that's writing, commenting, curating on Steemit. Maybe it's something else. But whatever your role is, it's important to keep doing it, whatever the market has done this week, this month, because doing it is worthwhile.
Go out there and throw strikes. You never know when good things will happen.
Thanks to 