In junior high school I was never one of the kids who stayed outside playing stickball until the streetlights came on. Instead, I spent at least half of every day either taking music instruction or practicing an instrument. I practiced classical piano and trumpet for ten to twelve hours each week; I was a member of the orchestra, band, jazz band, and marching band. I also sang in the church choir on Sundays. The closest I ever really got to coolness was when I joined a rock band with my buddy David Koenig. The guys and I rehearsed loudly every weekend in my garage, and we played at most of the junior high and church dances.
Though Dr. Wagner had put the joy of musicianship in me early on—no one plays that much music if they don’t like it—my mom put the fear of God in me if I ever failed to meet her daily piano and trumpet practice quota. This had a very limiting effect on my ability to get comfortable in my rangy body and to prepare for the rigors of high school social status displays, where athletic achievement trumped all.
I entered Garden City High School as a six-foot-six ninth grader, 150 pounds dripping wet. I resembled Ichabod Crane. Or a sandhill crane. Or a whooping crane. Take your pick of cranes. I fit in naturally with no one—not the greasers, the stoners, or the jocks. I also reeked of Clearasil. And with eight ounces of barbed wire and cement in my mouth (1960s orthodontia), I wasn’t number one on any girl’s Sadie Hawkins dance list. Even if, in theory, I got as far as “the kiss good night,” I risked sending the girl to the ER with a life-threatening mouth wound. To my mother’s delight, this dearth of girlfriend opportunities in junior high meant I had plenty of extra time for practice. Whether it was because she saw the future for me as a performer and a composer, or she realized that I was the only thing in her life over which she had any control, she had decided it would be her mission in life to turn her son into Van Cliburn, or at the very least, Doc Severinsen. Mom seemed to proceed instinctively, which I suspect came from her early experience as a young tennis prodigy and her focused study habits leading to her nursing degree. She’d place her Minute Minder egg timer on our upright piano and set it for two relentlessly long hours of tick-tick-ticking. And there I sat: me, the spinet piano, the Hanon Handbook: 60 Exercises for the Virtuoso Pianist (volume 1071), and that timer. The rule? I could go outside and play when the egg timer buzzed. No exceptions. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.
In 1960s Long Island, the true currency of coolness was the letter jacket. In Godfather parlance, if you had one of these jackets, you were a made man. I’m not even sure if the letter jacket is still a thing today, but in the late 1960s it was everything, and you could get one only if you had accumulated enough playing time in a varsity sport. With each additional sport, and with every additional year playing that sport, you got a new letter.
The Garden City High jacket was maroon and gray, our school colors. The body was wool. The sleeves were leather. You wore your varsity jacket at school, on the bus ride to and from school, to school dances, to the Saturday football games. Anyplace where signaling your coolness, where spending some of that currency, could produce real value. If you were serious about a girl and asked her to go steady, she typically got an ID bracelet with your name on it, but if your preference was a display of maximum devotion, she got your letter jacket. When the student body saw a girl wearing one of these varsity jackets, four sizes too big for her, with JOHNNY stenciled on the front, it was supposed to be Kryptonite for other boys. It was not at all cool for a guy to be caught talking to your girl by her locker if she was wearing your letter jacket. If this dynamic doesn’t feel familiar to you, I’m sure you’ve seen one of the bird-of-paradise mating rituals on Planet Earth. The male birds strut and preen for the attention of the most attractive female. It was like that.
If I was going to get one of these letter jackets, I was going to have to work my tail off to make the varsity team in whatever sport could use a persistent beanpole with a bottomless reservoir of energy and a very high tolerance for practice. At Garden City High, that meant soccer and track and field. I embraced the long stretches of monotonous, joint-aching, bone-grinding practice. Training for me never ended when we walked off the high school soccer field or I finished my last high jump at track practice. I was just not good enough for that. In the fall, during soccer season, the moment the afternoon bus dropped me off at home after our two-hour team practice, I set about kicking a soccer ball against our white wooden garage door. When the ball caromed off the garage, with unpredictable velocity and random trajectory, I defended against the ball as if I were on the field of play. Boom, boom, boom. The sound of the ball hitting the garage door echoed like a shotgun down Seabury Road. When my mom pulled out of our driveway to fetch Dad at the Garden City train station, she would show me a raised eyebrow and then I knew I had twenty more minutes before I had to shut it all down. This kind of noise, and the potential for defacing Dad’s garage door paint job, would have thrown him into a cocktail-infused-post-railroad-commuter rage.
So there I was, with even more tempo now—in old-school workout mode. A ball and the garage. I was like Rocky Balboa, punching out that slab of beef in the walk-in freezer. I’d lean over my right foot and kick the ball using my instep for more accuracy. I was on offense. The ball slammed into the upper right quadrant of the garage, high and outside enough so my imaginary goalie couldn’t get a hand on it. In an instant I’m a defender, as the ball, spinning with “English,” exploded off the garage door headed for my left foot. Boom, back at the garage. It only took a couple of minutes of this to generate a soaking sweat and burning lungs. This I did for an hour each day after my mandatory music practice. It paid off. The time spent defending myself against the garage eventually landed me a spot as a fullback (defender) on the varsity soccer team, which earned me a letter jacket.
In the spring, during track-and-field season, my extra practice routine was similar but the motivation was a little more self-directed, because the field events were the antithesis of a team sport like soccer. No one was yelling “Jump, Johnny! Jump!” during my high-jump competitions. High-jumping is a lonely pursuit, requiring a whole lot of self-motivation. Most of the time you look like a crazy person, walking in circles, talking to yourself, rehearsing the bottom movements before a jump. Indeed, the field events were as much a mind game as anything else. There was very little team camaraderie. No huddles. No cheerleaders. It was mostly you against the measuring tape and a white chalk line on the ground: run toward the bar, take off on one leg without touching the chalk foul line in the process, lift your torso into the air, and clear the metal bar, trying not to rupture yourself on the bar on the way down.
Yes, rupture was a real danger. High-jumping included the potential for what we jumpers called “a full groining.” You make it halfway over the bar and, without enough forward motion, your body stalls in midair. Gravity does the rest as it joins your groin with the bar and ultimately the ground. Not the way you want to spend an afternoon, a full groining.
My practice routine for the high jump took place in our backyard. I couldn’t hide this from Dad like I could my soccer drills. This one needed his approval since it required that I dig a trench for the jumping pit. He surprised me by not only approving the idea but by also sketching the build-out. We filled the trench with sand and used a long piece of bamboo for the bar. The bar stretched across two wooden stanchions that Dad built using eighth-inch dowels to adjust the height of the bar. The sand came from several pail-and-shovel journeys I made to nearby Jones Beach. Contraband sand. My left wrist was in perpetual sprain from the hundreds of hard-sand landings. The high-jump pit at the high school was made of rubber shavings, which made for a softer landing.
This relentless practice with bamboo and sand during the spring semester and the garage door in the fall ultimately paid big dividends for me. I was now winning medals in track-and-field meets. I even got my name in the school newspaper after breaking a Nassau County high-jump record. I was playing at least half of every soccer game—Mom in the stands during each and every one of them with cut-up oranges and Lik-M-Aid candy for the whole team. (The team presented her with a trophy at the end of our senior season.) And by the time I graduated, I’d earned three varsity soccer and four varsity track letters.
Just to be clear, those letters in no way equaled even one-third of a varsity football letter. I mean, seriously? But for a beanpole like me, it was today’s equivalent of an awesome online-dating profile photo. Even more than simply being a status symbol or a token of devotion, though, my letter jacket was recognition of accomplishment. To receive a varsity jacket and to earn the letters that would adorn it was to wear the proof of having set goals and achieved them, and I had created a process for achieving those goals that worked for me. Thankfully my new sports-infused identity established my social standing in high school, but more importantly, I learned the value of hustle and grit and focused practice.
There is a YouTube video with Grammy Award–winning musician and Oscar-nominated actor Will Smith that has inspired thousands of us grit-devotees. I always imagined Smith as an effortless performer, born with exceptional talent. Well, not according to him:
“I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented. Where I excel is ridiculous, sickening work ethic,” Will said. “The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is: I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be outworked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me. You might be all of those things. You got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die. It’s really that simple.”1
Will Smith is talking about grit.
Author and researcher Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied grit extensively. She wrote:
Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years. And working really hard to make that future a reality.2
When you ask the greatest artists and business leaders about their path to success, there is a sameness to their answers. Consistent, deliberate, mind-numbing work. Deep work.
Former Lakers player and head coach Byron Scott said he once found eighteen-year-old Kobe Bryant shooting in a dark gym two hours before practice:
I heard the ball bouncing. No lights were on. Practice was at about eleven, it was probably about nine, nine-thirty. And I go out to the court and I look, and there’s Kobe Bryant. He’s out there shooting in the dark. And I stood there for probably about ten seconds, and I said, “This kid is gonna be great.”3
The elite performance coach Tim Grover, who has worked with Michael Jordan, Dwyane Wade, and Kobe Bryant as well, put an even blunter point on this message:
People are always asking me about the secrets and tricks I use to get results. Sorry if this disappoints you: There are no secrets. There are no tricks. Ask yourself where you are now, and where you want to be instead. Ask yourself what you’re willing to do to get there. Then make a plan to get there. There are no shortcuts. I don’t want to hear about workouts you can do in five minutes a day, or twenty minutes a week; that’s total BS. Champions get into the Zone, shut out everything else, and control the uncontrollable.4
I know this to be true. I knew this even back in high school. And yet there have been so many times in my life when I’ve tried other, more modern, trendy formulas for success. Shortcuts. Because, guess what, hard work is hard. Even today on our Intelligence for Your Life radio show we share thirty to forty “success hacks” each month. It’s a booming business. The demand is definitely out there, in part because a lot of them work . . . for a while.
Search Amazon for success. You’ll get seventy-two thousand recommendations, but none of them, to Tim Grover’s point, are going to get you where you want to go, because accomplishment, said Will Smith, is very much about going the distance. When I read that as an adult, I can see that Smith was speaking directly to my teenage heart. Other athletes had better skills than I had in high school, but few could, or even wanted to, match my grit and mind-numbing tenacity. It was a formula that actually worked for me, and one that I would have to reengage with many years later if I was going achieve what felt like the most unachievable goal I’d ever set for myself: beating this cancer.