"Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is," said the Great One, famously. There you have it: perfect advice for hockey players. It goes without saying that Gretsky's sentence applies equally well to entrepreneurs, intellectuals, artists, and in fact, to anyone who has to cope with a world in continual flux. Ah, but how can anyone know where the puck is going to be next second, or next week, or a decade hence? Gretzky was one of those rare intuitive geniuses who did it all by instinct. Ordinary mortals must wrack their tiny brains until their heads hurt to guess at the trajectory of their own particular puck. Most of us, no matter how hard we try, are doomed to skate counter. There are other people (alas, I'm one of them) who skate aimlessly, only dimly aware that somewhere out there on the field of play is a target puck. Gretzky's wisdom deserves a prominent spot on the refrigerator of every moderately forward-looking, ambitious human being, where it can hang as both goad and frustration.
Here's another brilliant bit of Gretskyiana: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
Let us now turn to wisdom from Alan Sillitoe (young 'uns might not remember Sillitoe, but he was one of the important 'angry' English writers of the 1950s). Sillitoe blessed us with the forceful and epigrammatic truth that "all writing is fiction, especially non-fiction." I particularly savor that uncompromising, zingy "especially." If I understand rightly, Sillitoe meant that a) no matter how faithful to experience a writer wishes to be, the act of writing inevitably emphasizes or omits or compresses or expands and therefore transforms experience into a story, a fiction. And he also implied that b) no matter how factual the information, if it doesn't tell a story and act as a fiction it's not going to make its point. Moreover, and more subtly, he meant that c) any story is ineluctably influenced and shaped by common modes of storytelling, and even against a writer's will assimilates itself to existing genres. Bloggers, for example, are willy-nilly fictioneers who can't help writing bloglike posts. But beware: Alan Sillitoe most definitely did not mean to imply that because all narratives are culturally and artistically determined that they are therefore equivalent in value or truth; he was a practiced, practical writer, not some post-modern theory-soaked obscurantist.
Here's wisdom from the great Anatole Broyard. Of his adolescence, he wrote, memorably, "if it hadn't been for books, we'd have been entirely at the mercy of sex." "Mercy" is the well-chosen word that makes the sentence so piquant. Books, says Broyard, have the power to civilize all of us, even pubescents. Books can, and did, rescue him. As for myself, if I remember accurately, adolescence was, in spite of extra-large doses of books, merciless.
I don't know who first said that "you can't coach seven feet," but it's a common enough saying. It doesn't mean that that you can't coach a seven-footer, but that no matter how much instruction you offer a guy who's five-ten, he's never going to be seven feet tall or fill the space on the floor that requires a seven-footer. As I once heard a track coach remark, "I can teach them everything but speed." A similar sentence, of baseball pitchers: "you have to be born with the whip." For those of us who tried to teach less exotic subjects, I can offer some parallels from my own experience. "You can't coach brains"; "you can't coach talent."
But you can do something. You can, in words of great uncommon wisdom, "play the hand you're dealt."
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