Don’t Give Up Too Soon. And If You’re Breathing? It’s Too Soon.

“Will you relax?  You’ve got more paranoid fantasies than Stephen King on crack.” – News Radio

See, I win.  I don’t read him once a year, and he doesn’t read me 150 times a year.

One of my favorite stories is about Stephen King.  When he was trying to get his novel Carrie published, he sent out the copy to quite a few publishers, and was rejected again and again.  Finally, one day he got the novel back, again.  Still, the novel was as rejected as Joe Biden application to teach at an ethics seminar.

He gave up.  Disgusted, King threw the novel into the trash and went to work.  His wife, Tabitha, pulled it out of the trash.  In one version of the story I read, spaghetti sauce from the garbage had gotten on the cover of the manuscript, so Tabitha typed a new one, and encouraged Stephen to submit it one more time.  He did.

This final publisher, Doubleday©, loved Carrie.  They sent King an advance of $2,500, which he spent on a Ford® Pinto™ because he liked scary things.  But then the paperback rights netted King $200,000.  The novel and movie became hits, and paid for him to quit his job so he could focus on novel writing.  When asked what fuels his imagination, King actually said, “I have the heart of a little boy.  And I keep it in my desk drawer.”  But the real story is that King was exceptionally close to giving up.

King didn’t give up, and managed to give us some pretty interesting stories.  He probably has a net worth of $400 million or so based on his writing – all because Tabitha King pulled a manuscript out of the trash, and they sent it out to a publisher.  One more time.

I tried to donate blood the other day, but they wanted to know whose it was.

I personally feel that King’s writing quality began to diminish significantly in 1992 along with his reduction in cocaine and alcohol consumption.  I gave up on him around 2005.  He’s like your friend that’s really only interesting when he’s wasted, like Nancy Pelosi at a press conference.

Despite this, Stephen King is undoubtedly a success story even though at this point in his life his Twitter® account looks like Jack Torrance© from The Shining™ after all work and no play have made him a dull boy.  I’m not in favor of King returning to his addictions and having someone convince him that a Democrat is president, but, you know he is 72.  How much could it hurt?

Now, watch Stephen imagine a microwave filled with cocaine? 

The dead Danish thinker dude, Søren Kierkegaard, (English translation of Søren Kierkegaard:  “delicious pastry” – which I believe is the translation all Danish words), coined one of my favorite quotes that’s appropriate to this post:

“It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

Said in a different way, it makes sense looking backward to see how Stephen King’s success was built upon rejection.  Likely that rejection fueled him to get better, and by the time he “made it” he had been working for years to become an excellent writer.  It is also poetic that Stephen’s final success was made possible by someone who had more faith in him (Tabitha) than he did at that point.

How much do you have to drink to imagine an alien clown in a sewer?

I first read the Kierkegaard quote in the mid-1990’s and began to understand:  the worst times in my life were the seeds for the best times in my life.  For instance:

I recall being in 8^th grade at a wrestling tournament.  I weighed 145 pounds (14.5 kilograms – you just divide by 10 to convert), which in that time and place was heavyweight, or HWT.  The Mrs. and I refer to HWT as “hot water tank,” mainly because it’s amusing.  The wrestling tournament had been going all day that Saturday and on that cold February night it was dark outside – the windows that normally streamed light into the gym were pitch black, lending an air of importance.

There was a single match left:  the hot water tank championship.  It was me against (who else) another guy named John, in this case John Bishop.  Neither one of us was fat – we were both in pretty good shape.  And John Bishop was strong – very strong – he was 32 and in 8^th grade.  But he slept well.

John and I went toe to toe for the entire match, each searching for an opening while being countered.  At the end of regulation, four and a half minutes of wrestling, the score was tied, 1-1.  Since this was a tournament, there would be no ties.

It was overtime.

In overtime, the three periods were short – 1 minute; 30 seconds; and 30 seconds. At the end of the second overtime period it was still 1-1, and the crowd was yelling, urging each of us on.  I had never felt such electricity at any sporting event, and here I was, caught up in the middle of it.  In that last period of overtime, in that last second before the match was done, John Bishop escaped.

I lost, 2-1.

That was a tough match.  I still have the taste of Muppet® in my mouth.  Did you know they bleed blue?

The crowd actually came onto the mat afterwards, and there I was sitting on that same mat, exhausted.  I can still clearly recall sitting on the wrestling mat, surrounded by people congratulating John Bishop.

It was also the last match of the school year.  I had lost.  I had given it all I had, every fiber of my being, and I had lost.

My brother, John Wilder (yes, his real first name is John, just like mine) was there for the whole match.  He was in college and had spent the day in the gym watching me wrestle because he felt responsibility:  he’s the one that convinced me to try wrestling in the first place.

He sat down next to me on the pine bleachers as I unlaced my hand-me-down Adidas® wrestling shoes – his old shoes.  He put his arm around my shoulder.  He asked me to see the second place medal I had in my hand.  I gave it to him.  He looked at it, for what seemed like forever.

“You really earned this one.  John, I’ve never seen you wrestle better in my life.  I’m so proud of you.”

That moment could have been soul crushing.  It could have been a moment where I decided to give wrestling up.  Instead, that was a moment where I knew I could be better.  I knew deep inside of me, that I could do this, that this was part of who I was supposed to be.  I wasn’t crushed, I was filled with resolve.  Over the next four years I won a lot more wrestling matches than I lost, but that one loss in particular opened the door for all of the success that followed.

And the next time I wrestled John Bishop, less than a year later?  I pinned him inside of thirty seconds.

This has been a repeating pattern in my life when I look back.  Every time that I have been faced with adversity and failure, that failure was the seed for future success.  Losses in wrestling are, perhaps, among the most soul-crushing defeats a man can face.

On the mat there are only two men.  There is no place to hide.  There is no one else to blame if you lose.  It is you.  Only you.  I have seen grown men cry like they had spilled a beer when they lost a match.

As bad as losing a wrestling match is, a divorce is worse.  Even a divorce where both sides agree to part is a very difficult thing, and my divorce was no exception.  Divorces are hard.  They’re also expensive.  Why are they expensive?  They’re worth it.

But my divorce set the seed for eventually finding The Mrs., which led to The Boy and Pugsley.

I enjoyed this movie.  It finally allowed Country Music to be complete – now the truck could leave the singer, too.

The second lesson is persistence.  In most cases, overnight success occurs after about ten years of diligent effort – thousands of hours of intense practice.  You’d assume that concert violinists, for instance, start with talent for the instrument.  You’d certainly be correct.  But what’s missing from the equation is practice.  The average world-class concert violinist practices more, not less than the average violin player.  A really good violinist still sounds like they’re strangling a cat, but maybe more slowly or something.

Talent gets you a ticket, but practice is a multiplier.  A necessary multiplier.  Einstein said his difficulties with math were much more than the average person – precisely because he was working at the far end of what was understood about mathematics at his time and place.

Finally, you still have to deal with reality.  At no point in my life would any amount of practice and study have made me a great basketball player – my skills aren’t there.  And that’s the point – when you’re going through life you’ll get clues that tell you which way to go.  The biggest clue?  Success.  Success is a guidepost – it tells you where you have relative skill.  Stephen King was continually published in pulp and nudie magazines at the time.  Not big money, but still an indication that he had ability, because everyone read Playboy© for the articles, right?

Find your successes.  Feed them.  Understand your failures and how you can use them.  Work harder than anyone else at becoming great.  And also keep in mind that one phone call, one text, one conversation in an elevator might bring it all together.

Then, in the end, you can look backward and understand.

Or just be a cranky old goat like Stephen King.