The Man Who Thinks He Can

"The Man Who Thinks He Can”

If you think you are beaten, you are;

If you think you dare not, you don’t.

If you like to win, but you think you can’t,

It’s almost certain you won’t.

If you think you’ll lose, you’ve lost,

For out in the world we find

Success begins with a fellow’s will;

It’s all in the state of mind.

If you think you’re outclassed, you are.

You’ve got to think high to rise.

You’ve got to be sure of yourself before

You can ever win a prize.

Life’s battles don’t always go

To the stronger or faster man,

But sooner or later the man who wins

Is the one who thinks he can.

Walter D. Wintle—1904

I was at a funeral, and the pastor read a poem about success in life. It wasn’t the one above, but the pastor’s words brought “The Man Who Thinks He Can” to my mind. What’s the big deal about the words to Walter D. Wintle’s poem? Well, when I was in high school, I had the same basketball coach for my freshman, sophomore, and senior seasons. Coach Legutko would put the aforementioned poem on numerous printed materials, and he would quote it—especially the last verse—often. It’s interesting how more than thirty years later, I could quote the last verse from memory and easily find it on the internet. Coach Legutko’s words impacted my way of thinking.

Most of my youthful years I dreamed of being a pro baseball player, but as the years progressed, I found that I was actually more proficient as a basketball player—a sport I also played nowhere near a professional level. When I graduated, I was 5’7” and 140 pounds. But I had a coach for a father, a man who spent unfathomable amounts of time working with me and developing my skills. And then I had Coach Legutko who believed in me and instilled in me the certainty that though I was a small man playing a big man’s game, I had skills and attributes that gave me an advantage. My dad molded those skills, but my coach gave me confidence and determination.

Today, I write books (and an occasional blog), but I would have never believed I would be a writer during the twenty-five years or so from the time I graduated high school. In those years, I continued to play golf, softball, and basketball competitively. I coached two or three sports a year for twenty-six years. My two kids experimented with numerous sports and played three varsity sports each. I was a competitive person who coached competitive athletes and raised competitive kids. And now I’m a writer, so naturally, I write competitively.

What? I know some of you are thinking, “LaFerney’s a nutcase. I figured he was as soon as he starting writing, but now I’m certain.” Well, like a true competitor, as a writer I refuse to quit. I learned from sports that people who are successful don’t give up, so every novel I’ve started (seven), I’ve stubbornly completed, and in my opinion, each has been better than the one before. And like the competitor that I am, I battle writer’s block like it’s an enemy to be defeated, and it’s never gotten the best of me. I obsessively and compulsively keep on keeping on until I’m done because I believe that what I’m writing is worth reading, but no one can read it until I’ve finished (I’m so philosophical). I also write competitively because I refuse to be lazy. Successful, winning competitors are not lazy. That means when I write, I do research to accurately portray even the smallest of details. I talk to experts. I read and read, determinedly learning about my topic. Does anyone remember that silly advertisement from years and years ago where the actor said, “I’m not really a doctor. I just play one on TV”? Well, I put together a brain surgery from my research, and then I sent it to a doctor to read. He suggested one alteration. I was pretty pumped about that. I’ve since had an anesthesiologist tell me I made a minor mistake, but that means my brain surgeon friend did too. It’s probably good that he’s not responsible for that part of the surgery. But I digress.

I also write competitively because I’m not willing to settle. Some writers are in such a hurry to be published that they do not take revision and editing seriously. I do, and it’s not just because I happen to be an English major (which scares the crap out of people who write notes to me). I happen to understand that mistakes happen in the writing process, but I’m determined to get rid of them. I know punctuation rules better than most; however, I still look things up when I’m not 100% certain. And I know grammar better than most, but I’m not so vain as to think I do things right the first time every time. You know, I even take those red, green, and blue lines seriously when I use Microsoft Word. Sometimes they’re wrong, but usually they’re not. I also write with my thesaurus and the search feature open, and I use them—they don’t just sit there taking up space on my screen. When I finish my draft, I’m certain I want my book out just as much as the next writer, but I want to be proud of it, and I don’t ever want anyone criticizing my writing conventions. I’m a writer…I ought to be an “expert” at my craft.

The fact that I can take constructive criticism is also an indication that I’m a competitive writer. I never had a coach—and neither did my kids—who didn’t give constructive criticism. Some even managed to give criticism that wasn’t constructive at all, but once again, I digress. What I do when I revise is I have people read my books before publication, and I ask them to tell me what they really think. It’s amazing how their ideas and suggestions make so much sense when I’m not being defensive. Being defensive just means we’re stubbornly unwilling to grow. I don’t agree with everyone’s every comment, but I’ve learned a lot and changed a lot of things over the last ten years by listening to people, and I’m not afraid to be told something could be better. I want it to be better.

Finally, I’ve learned from my competitiveness that it takes time to get good at something. I understand from sports that I can start over and re-do and re-try things until they’re done right. In sports, it was called practice. In writing, it’s called process. Who doesn’t practice music over and over before performing it? Who doesn’t rehearse scenes before acting them? Who gives up on the meal simply because they burned something (my wife is not to be included in that example). In the novel Robinson Crusoe, when Crusoe was stranded on his island, he salvaged corn kernels from his sunken ship. The first two years he experimented with planting them, and he failed miserably both times. But he got it right the third year, and he had corn for the other twenty-five or so years on the island. He tried I-don’t-know-how-many times to make cooking utensils and chairs and what not, failing before he learned how to do it right. And once he figured things out, he did them over and over until he found it wasn’t so difficult, and he was getting better and better at it. He got better during practice. Writing is a process that takes time, attention to detail, trial and error, successes and failures, and good days and bad; but over time, I’ve learned about planning, researching, organizing, characterizing, dealing with time issues, leaving clues and misdirection, writing dialogue, and on and on. I wasn’t an expert when I started, and I’m still not, but I’m getting closer. I’m making strides.

I know “The Man Who Thinks He Can” is a poem about sports, but I think it applies to writing a novel too. Writers get rejection letters or lose contests or get bad reviews or publish a book that doesn’t sell or have writer’s block or let life’s circumstances get in the way of writing. But I’ve learned to treat writing a book like competing in a sport, and I hated to lose. I hated to perform badly. I was driven to be better than others, and considering my size, I usually had to work harder than them. Now I take that competitiveness to my writing. I hold fast to the “dream” because I write competitively, and I’m “the man who thinks he can.”

Where's Waldo?

When I was a kid, I was watching an Alfred Hitchcock movie with my parents when my dad casually mentioned that we were supposed to look for Alfred’s appearance somewhere in the film. I had no idea what he looked like, so I didn’t know what I was looking for, but sure enough, both of my parents noticed him at the same time, so I was pretty sure they were being straight with me. In a couple of future movies, they pointed him out again. I thought that was pretty cool that he made the cameos. It was something unique by which he could be remembered.

This is neither here nor there but I used to enjoy the Where’s Waldo books with my kids. Finding a nerdy guy in a red and white striped shirt shouldn’t have been so difficult. I was with a bunch of eighth graders in Washington, D.C., in Arlington National Cemetery a few years back. We were in the middle of the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers when a colleague of mine whispered, “Where’s Waldo?” I temporarily focused my attention in the direction of his head nod, and sure enough, there he was, red and white striped shirt and all, except this Waldo had a big belly, and he was a she, but it didn’t matter because my head nearly exploded as I tried to keep the laughter bottled up inside. 

One book series that I grew to like an awful lot was the Clive Cussler/Dirk Pitt series. I began to notice that Cussler often slipped in a scene in his books where Dirk Pitt ran into an old drifter by the name of Clive Cussler. He always seemed familiar to Dirk when he saw the man, but Pitt could never place where he’d seen him before. 

When I was writing Loving the Rain, I wanted to be unique too, so I began the process—which I continued in each of the Clay and Tanner Thomas books as well as my upcoming time travel adventure, Jumper—inserting a few unique things in each book. For one, each of my books had at least one character with a name very close to a friend of mine. People who know me and my friends would know that. There was a Mr. Henson, a Verne Gilbert, an Eric Haynes, and a Bonnie Webster.

Also, each book mentions one of my favorite authors, and Clive Cussler got to be the first. Skeleton Key and Bulletproof mentioned Harlan Coben and John Grisham. In Jumper, I actually mentioned six of my favorite characters from my favorite authors' books. In Loving the Rain, I started the tradition of including a small animal. A porcupine was a predecessor to an annoying squirrel, a skunk, and finally a small shih tzu. In each book, I have at least one character whose name I have a little fun with. In Loving the Rain, I have two detectives named Hutch and Janski, so I made a dig about Starski and Hutch. Luke Hopper, the police detective in Skeleton Key with copper-colored hair, was nicknamed “Copper,” and most people thought his name was Lew Copper. I had some fun with that. In Bulletproof, my policemen were Butch Casserly and Micky Kidder. I couldn’t help referring to them as Butch Casserly and the Sundance Kidder. I also had Sherman Tankersley who, of course, was as big as a Tank—a Sherman tank—and a Sparrow Nester. In Jumper, Hannah Carpenter moves to Montana, so there was no getting around the Hannah Montana reference, and I also had a little fun with some bouncers named after the Three Stooges. Here’s a scene from Skeleton Key where I had a little fun with the names of two attorneys:

 

The cold of early December was upon them, so Marshall buttoned up his coat and departed down the street toward Nickel and Sons Attorneys. He stepped into the offices, a few minutes early for his appointment, and found his attorney, Toni Nickel, refilling a cup of coffee in her mug. “Hey, Morty. Come on right in. How’re you doing?”

“When’re you gonna change that sign outside?” Marshall asked. “Don’t you think that when clients come calling they’ll notice Oscar Nickel’s ‘sons’ are female? Just ’cause your names are Toni and Andi Nickel doesn’t mean that people aren’t gonna notice you have breasts.”

“Have you ever seen an attorney’s office called ‘Blank and Daughters,’ Morty? How ’bout you, Andi?” she called into her sister’s office. “You ever hear of an attorney’s office with the word daughter in it?”

“Nope,” Andi called back to her sister. 

“We were thinking of changing the name, though, Morty.” She raised her voice so her sister could hear. “How about ‘Daddy/Daughters, Attorneys at Law’? Or ‘Nickel and Double Nickels’?” 

“I like ‘Nickel and Dames,’” Andi called from her office. 

I also always have characters who speak bad grammar, and I make at least one correction in each book. Here’s an excerpt from Bulletproof:  

Clay and Tanner once again walked into the Speedway Gas Station. A female with a badge that said “Connie” was restocking candy. Clay approached her. “Is there any way we could pry Eddie, over there, away from the counter?” Clay pointed his thumb in Eddie’s direction as he spoke. 

“Who are you?” she asked.

“We’d like a few minutes to talk to Eddie about the robbery about a week ago.”

“Are you cops? ’Cause if you’re not, he’s workin’.”

“Is there a manager here?” Tanner asked.

“I’m the assistant manager. Eddie said the cops said not to talk to no one.”

Tanner shook his head sadly and then controlled Connie’s mind. “Well, if he can’t talk to no one, he must be able to talk to someone. I happen to be someone. Tell Eddie someone’s here to talk to him. It’s okay for him to talk to someone, Connie.”

“Eddie, take a break. I’ll cover for ya. Someone’s here to talk to you.”

“And, Connie?” Tanner smiled and pointed to his dad. “This man is nobody. If any cops come here and ask if anyone came to talk to Eddie, don’t tell them someone was here; tell them nobody was here, okay? You can’t remember someone. You’ll only remember that nobody was here.” Tanner was enjoying slinging indefinite pronouns around. 

She went off to work the cash register. Clay smiled at Tanner’s sense of humor. “Do you think Eddie’ll be as weak-minded as Connie was?”

“More’n likely.”

Eddie slowly approached the men. “Who are you?”

“We’d like to talk to you a few minutes, Eddie, about the robbery about a week ago.”

“Are you cops? ’Cause if you’re not, I have work to do.”

“We asked your manager,” Tanner said.

“She ain’t the manager—she’s just the assistant—and the cops said not to talk to no one,” he replied.

Tanner looked at his dad. “Do you think I saw into the future? I’m pretty sure I already had this conversation. Does everyone in Fenton speak in double negatives?” Tanner rolled his eyes and shook his head again and then controlled Eddie’s mind. “You can’t speak to no one, but you can speak to someone. I’m someone. He’s nobody, so don’t concern yourself with him.” He looked at his dad who was shaking his own head with a grin. “Let’s go into the office.”

I figured that even though writing is a fantastic hobby, sometimes it’s just plain hard work. I wanted to have some fun. I assume other authors do the same thing, but whether they do or not, it’s my thing to do--my own Where's Waldo?--and it’s one way for me to get some additional enjoyment from my writing. My writer’s tip for the day is to do something creative and express yourself in a unique way. I’m curious to hear other stories from my blog followers.

Daylight Savings and Atomic Clocks

I know Daylight Savings isn’t “celebrated” everywhere in the world, but it’s one big happy party for Americans. Let’s see, we can go to bed an hour early and get up at our normal time, thereby not “losing” an hour’s sleep, or we can go to bed at our normal time and sleep in an hour, so we get the recommended daily allowance of sleep for the night. The trouble is, if we do either, the next night—you know, the night before Marvelous Monday and work again—we can’t fall asleep at our normal time because our body tells us it’s an hour earlier than the clock reports; therefore, we lose the hour of sleep anyway. It’s totally a lose/lose situation. I guess the bright side is that in just six short months, we change our clocks again, and everything will be back in balance in the universe.

By the way, do intelligent-thinking people ever wonder what is the actual value of Daylight Savings? I hate to warn the government agency or political genius that this idea doesn’t make sense…but it doesn’t make sense. On Sunday, March 10, 2013, in my home town, there was 11 hours and 39 minutes of daylight. If the political genius rearranged the clock so that the sun would rise exactly one hour later, by all my calculations, it would set one hour later too, giving me 11 hours and 39 minutes of daylight. Only a naïve political genius and/or government agency would think that some daylight was “saved.” I mean, if I cut a foot off the top of a board and attached it to the bottom of the board, the board would not be longer. Or if educational spending is cut by a billion dollars but then an additional billion dollars is handed out to a foreign country, the budget wasn’t cut.  So what daylight is being saved?

Enough ranting. I have another serious issue with Daylight Savings Time. My atomic clock doesn’t change. Oh, there’s a setting in there somewhere that a person could find if he or she had instructions, but what red-blooded American man would keep those around? So here’s the problem. On Saturday, March 9, and Sunday, March 10, my wife and I performed the happy labor of changing numerous clocks ahead one hour (including the one on our DVD player that took about a half hour to figure out). Awesome funness is what I call the clock-changing experience. But if I change my atomic clock ahead one hour, it rethinks itself and changes back. What this means is that six months out of the year, it projects the wrong time.

Let me explain some things. I’m blind. Okay…not literally because if I was, I wouldn’t have any reason to read my clock. But 20-500 vision is nearly blind. That’s why I flood the bathroom with blazing light in the morning—light which challenges the sun in wattage. I can’t see in the shadows and such…especially now that it’s dark again in the morning! But I digress. Until I put in my contact lenses, I’m blind. But I don’t wear my contacts to bed and my wife was getting tired of me crawling all over her body in the middle of the night in an attempt to get my face three inches from the clock on her nightstand to find out how many more minutes I could sleep. So she purchased me an atomic clock which projected in giant red numbers on the wall just above my head, and I could see it! And for six months out of the year, it projects the actual time. The other six months of the year, starting on Sunday morning, March 10, I have to do math in the middle of the night.

Math in the middle of the night doesn’t sound impossible. I should be able to add ONE to the number on the wall right? Wrong. This is what happens. I roll over and glance up at that beautiful red projection, and it says 3:37, for instance. My mind at that time is working at about .0073% capacity, so I think, “Crap! Something in my mind, way back in a dark place is nagging a notion that it really isn’t 3:37. I wonder what time it really is?” Well, it’s 3:38 because a whole minute has passed while I formulated that thought. Then I think, “Oh, yeah, my clock is an hour off. Great! Do I add an hour or subtract one?” I can’t believe how I can be staring at those once-gorgeous digits, that once-satisfying projection, while my neck is cramping from the sustained effort to decide what time it really is. Well, it’s 3:39—somewhere. Just not in my room.

Eventually, after two full minutes of concerted brain exercise, my mind begins to function at 2.3892% capacity, and I remember that my clock is behind by one hour—which means, I have to add one hour to the 3:39 projection which has just changed to 3:40, and I find that it’s a very difficult problem. I mean, I’m pretty sure I could handle it at most times during the day, just not at 3:40 a.m….I mean 3:41. So I strain, maybe even create a visual image of a piece of paper with 3 + 1 = ____ , and eventually I reach the conclusion that it’s 4:41 a.m….I mean 4:42…and I have some more time to sleep. The trouble is, my brain has by then awakened to somewhere near 3.1216% capacity which I’m fairly certain is Pi. Unfortunately, I believe that number also to be the perfect scientific degree of awakedness that guarantees a sleeper to not be able to fall back asleep.

I’ve read that Daylight Savings was Ben Franklin’s idea—he’s had better ones. I’ve read that the Germans devised the evil scheme to save energy during World War I—danke not! To me, it means six months of blissful bedtime convenience turns into six months of mental acupuncture. It’s been four nights. The countdown—to the day that there is balance in the universe once again—has begun.

Vivid Examples of Excellence

"Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence."-George F. Will

In 1989, Michigan point guard, Rumeal Robinson, was fouled at the end of a game against Wisconsin. With no time on the clock and his team down by one point, Robinson proceeded to miss both free throws. There is no worse experience for an athlete than to be put in a position to win the game and to fail. It’s something that is devastating enough that it could ruin a weak-minded individual, but Robinson wasn’t the sort. The story is that he shot 100 extra free throws after every practice from that day forward because if the situation happened again, he didn’t want to fail. Later in the year, in the NCAA championship game in overtime, he drove to the basket in an attempt to make the game-winning shot, but he was fouled. With no time on the clock, and down by one point, Rumeal Robinson calmly sank both free throws to give his team a one-point victory—an NCAA championship.

Several years later, I was coaching a 7^th grade girls’ basketball team. We were undefeated, late in the season. I don’t recall if we were behind by one or two points, but one of my starters, a girl by the name of Stephanie Duell, was fouled on the last play of the game. She immediately started crying. She knew if she missed, our undefeated season was over and the emotion of the moment overwhelmed her. She shot the free throws, and, of course, missed. We lost one game that year. That was the only season I coached 7^th grade. The next year, I moved up with the team to 8^th grade. Stephanie was the hardest working girl on the team. Every time we shot free throws, she made it a competition between me and her. She practiced extra, and she was very good, but wouldn’t you know it, later in the year, against the same team with our same undefeated record on the line, Stephanie was fouled with no time on the clock, our team down by two points. That time there was no tears. She walked straight to the line and sank them both. I couldn’t have been prouder of one of my players than I was right then.

Two years ago, Detroit Catholic Central High School lost in the state wrestling finals to Oxford High. The number one ranked DCC team led going into the last match but lost the state title when Evan Toth was defeated. Two years later, last Saturday, as fate would have it, DCC was pitted against Davison High School, and Davison was leading 26-23 as the last two wrestlers walked onto the mat—one of them was Evan Toth. Based on criteria, if tied at the end of the meet, Davison would win, so Evan Toth couldn’t just win the match, earning his team three points—he needed bonus points. A simple win wouldn’t be good enough, and before he knew it, he was down 9-2 with his state championship dreams fading away once again. But Toth didn’t give up hope. While grappling against a quality wrestler, the clock, and demons from his past, Toth pinned his opponent with just thirty-five seconds remaining, earning six points—enough to give his team the state championship.

All three stories are feel bad stories followed up by feel good stories. All three stories demonstrate how sports can be a vivid example of excellence. Michael Jordan, a man whose name is synonymous with game-winning heroics said the following: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” John Wooden, considered by many as the greatest college basketball coach of all time said, “Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out.” Abraham Lincoln said, “Let no feeling of discouragement prey upon you, and in the end you are sure to succeed.” Colin R. Davis said, “The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.”

I’ve been blessed as an athlete, a teacher, a parent, a coach, and a sports fan to witness incredible feel-good stories of people who looked into the face of previous discouragement, previous failures, and previous mistakes, and instead of letting those moments defeat them, they rose above them and succeeded. They understood—and sports is usually a vivid example of it—that while others are simply dreaming of success, winners wake-up in the morning and work hard to achieve it. All of the feel-good, come-back stories that I mentioned earlier are examples of people who didn’t let failure get the best of them. They worked hard, prepared themselves well, and ended up succeeding in the very thing for which they failed earlier. Why don’t more people take the lessons from sports and apply them to their lives? Why do independent writers, for instance, write a book that doesn’t sell well and then put in the same effort and do the same things for the next book and expect it to do better? Why wouldn’t an indie writer take LOTS of extra time learning punctuation, capitalization, and grammar rules? Why wouldn’t the writer listen to advice from knowledgeable readers whom they can trust and be willing to make changes to his or her book—maybe even a complete overhaul? Why wouldn’t a writer use a thesaurus, do word searches for repetitious words, and even double and triple-check for spelling and capitalization and punctuation consistencies?

Athletes like Rumeal Robinson, Stephanie Duell, Evan Toth, and Michael Jordan went the extra mile, dedicated the extra effort, and refused to give in to failure. They believed in themselves and realized that in life there are usually numerous failures and mistakes on the road to success. Albert Einstein said, “It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” Earl Nightingale  said, “Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use.” Winston Churchill said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” And finally, Thomas Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” Yes, sports serve society by giving vivid examples of excellence—examples that everyone can apply to any area of life. Do you need to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try again? Then it’s time to renew your efforts and enthusiasm because the next great success story might be yours.