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?

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One of the staples of the modern music world is the “Greatest Hits” album. When an artist has been around for a while, and they’ve had at least a few hits, it’s customary for their record company to release a new album that re-packages all those hit songs.

Have you ever thought about the work required to actually create enough songs for a Greatest Hits album? If you look at the albums of any popular artist, you’ll see that they generally only have a couple of truly “hit” songs from each one. Occasionally, you’ll have an artist with four or five massive songs from one album such as Richard Marx’s 1987 album “Repeat Offender,” which had at least four massive hits. Or you’ll have a true superstar like country legend Garth Brooks, who was on such a hot streak in the 1990s that almost every song was a huge hit. And let’s not forget the Beatles, who were so far above everyone else that almost everything they touched turned to gold.

But the exceptions prove the rule. Most of the time, a band or solo artist making traditional albums only have a couple of hit songs for every ten they put on an album. What’s more, they often don’t know which 20% of songs will be a hit as they’re making the record. They’re just doing the work.

The same success rate holds true in other industries. For example, the Major League Baseball batting average for 2019 was .252. That means players are “successful” less than 30% of the time! In fact, if a pro baseball player has a .300 average, they are considered excellent!

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 “hit.” But if you look to other industries such as music and baseball, you will have a “hit” less than three out of ten times.

Does this mean the other seven attempts are failures? Not at all.

Every time you step up to the plate, or go into that recording studio, or sit down to write, you’re putting in the work. You’re developing your craft. You’re getting better all the 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 when you do the work on a daily basis, and you do it over the years and decades, you are almost guaranteed to have a collection of hits.

The legendary jazz singer Tony Bennett reiterated this idea in his book Life is a Gift when he talked about focusing on a long-term collection of hits rather than momentary success. He said, “The public might get the impression that singers only want number-one hits, but that has never been my premise. Instead of being number one, I only wanted to be one of the best. I just keep being myself, and I never compromise. I never strived for a hit song, some novelty tune that would hit it big but be forgotten in two weeks: I wanted a hit catalog. If I do something, I want it to be top quality.”

Don’t focus on being a one-hit wonder. Instead, focus on doing the daily creative work that will create not just one hit, but a whole collection of hits over the years and decades.

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