But I’m nobody
That’s right. You’re an outsider. No insiders think the way you do. They ignore you. But, you realize the insiders don’t know any more about what they’re talking about than you. You tell yourself, “I could do better than them.”
So, do you keep repeating that to yourself, and tell others, and talk talk talk? Do you climb onto the big Opinion Throne and pontificate on the shortcomings and idiocy of experts? You have to fight your way onto that throne; it’s crowded. Noisy, too. No one hears the pontificating of anyone else, because everyone is only listening to themselves. You, too.
Or do you act?
Shut up and do something
In 1976 Bill James did something. He was reading preseason baseball annuals and had that “I could do as good as these guys” thought. So he did as good as those guys, only better.
Except only a very few number of people knew he did it better. He researched, wrote, and put together his own yearly baseball annual, but it never had more than a few hundred readers in any year. He sold it using a teeny ad in a magazine. It was tremendous work. He said he had “no understanding of the difficulty of finishing the book and getting it published.”
He did it anyway. Then he did another and another.
Who was Bill James? A night security guard at Stokely Van Camp pork and beans cannery. So who are you?
Find out what’s there
Bill James committed out of conviction and obsession. If you have an animal hope caged inside you, let it out and see where it goes. Even a geeky baseball statistics kind of hope can be an animal.
“Everybody I talked to about it told me that there was no market for this stuff, the public didn't care about this kind of material. Even the people who were interested in it thought there was no economic number of people who shared their interest. Of course I had times when I thought everybody else might be right and I might be wrong.”
“I work by obsession rather than discipline.”
Let what happens, happen
What can happen with a small audience? One of his readers wrote for Sports Illustrated magazine, and did a story on Bill James and his yearly self-published book. That story lead to publication and the NY Times bestseller list.
Another reader in the old days ended up owning the Boston Red Sox baseball team. A few years ago they hired Bill to help them analyze players. He now owns two World Series championship rings. Before Bill, the Red Sox had not won a World Series in 86 years. The outsider had arrived.
Actually he arrived long before that. Within ten years of beginning to write, five of those self-published, Bill James permanently changed the way people thought about baseball. The invisible truths he wrote about when no one cared, have now become part of the foundation of baseball strategy. The movie Moneyball is about the beginnings of his influence on the game.
His hope was not to change baseball. His hope was to pursue an inner passion. Results were a by-product.
Here’s the evolution of Bill James’ Baseball Abstract, from the homemade, typewritten versions that his wife illustrated, to the mass-appeal bestseller editions
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Start at the beginning of 31 Days of Scary Hope: encouragement to go from IS to COULD BE -- HERE.
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