On a nice, warm evening in Barcelona, Mike Cernovich once gave me two of the most important pieces of advice I’ve ever received. They made a major difference in how I approached projects and how I finished them.
Stop being such an upper middle-class pussy.
Scratch and claw.
I’ll go into the details of what those two things mean some other time, but these statistics explain the necessity of the latter:
Frank Sinatra: 1,200 songs, 209 hits, 17 percent success rate
Elvis Presley: 710 songs, 40 hits, 5.6 percent success rate
Babe Ruth: 8,399 at-bats, 714 home runs, 8.5 percent success rate
Pablo Picasso: 147,800 pieces, 30 masterpieces, 0.02 percent success rate
The point isn’t whether it works or not, and it isn’t whether you win any approval or not, the point is that you keep moving forward, you keep improving, and you keep creating the new possibilities for future success. That applies to everything, from people to projects.
The song, of course, is more about patience than persistence, but then, patience is a necessary element of persistence.
Keep grinding.
