Yesterday, we talked about the value of hitting singles. The main idea was this: if you focus on getting small wins every day, you will eventually win the game.

Let’s look at this from another perspective. Recently, I was doing a little 90’s musical reminiscing and listening to the Backstreet Boys (Don’t judge me). It dawned on me that I only knew a couple of their songs.

That got me thinking… they’ve only had a few big hits over the years, even though they’ve been making music since the mid-90’s. With nine studio albums, that’s not a great batting average.

But it’s the same story for almost every musical artist. On average, a full-length album might only have 1-2 “hits.” It’s a little discouraging if you think about it.

But the same holds true in other industries. If we go back to our baseball analogy, my research shows that the Major League Baseball batting average for 2019 was .252.

That means baseball players, on average, are “successful” less than 30% of the time! In fact, if a pro baseball player has a .300 average, they are considered excellent!

Here’s my point: We can’t expect to hit a home run every time we write or create.

Have you ever written something and expected people to immediately love it? Maybe you wrote an article, book, or social media post and felt disappointed that it wasn’t a home run. Maybe you were frustrated that it didn’t get the likes, reviews, or traction that you expected.

But if we look to both the music industry and professional baseball as a standard, we will have “hits” less than three out of ten times.

Does this mean the other seven attempts are failures? Not at all. It means a few different things:

1. We don’t get to choose what is successful and what is not. Our job is to write consistently with excellence and let others decide what is a “hit.”
2. Every time we are “at-bat,” it’s practice. We’re putting in the work. We’re developing our craft. We’re getting better all the time.
3. Games are normally won or lost by singles. This means we shouldn’t denigrate the value of a small chunk of work. Those small chunks of work add up over time.

You can’t control whether someone will love your work. There are so many factors at play that it’s nearly impossible to engineer a hit. But the more times we go to the plate and swing the bat, the more likely it is that we’ll get that occasional hit.

So today, don’t worry about hitting a home run. Just focus on hitting a single. Or to put it in artistic terms, be like Michelangelo and keep chip-chip-chipping away at that marble until that masterpiece is done.

Remember: those little victories add up quickly.

Daily Question: Is the desire to have a “big hit” keeping you from achieving a small win each day?