The Other Side of Talent

December 23, 2015September 21, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“He has a talent,” one person said of another. “I don’t know what it is,” she furthered, “but he has a real knack for taking photos.” The subject of that compliment beamed in the aftermath. The compliment was vague, but she used the ‘T’ word, and very few can avoid the gush that follows having a ‘T’ word thrown at them.

It was a nice photo (not the one pictured here), but the ‘T’ word? The compliment suggested that this photo was but one of a long line of photos that you had to see to believe, but it was still just a photo.

Most of us reserve our use of the ‘T’ word for athletic and artistic accomplishments, but we know that many use it in broad terms. We know, for example, that an engineer can display a wide array of talents for his craft that others may not have, but we often say that that person is good at what he does, a master craftsman, or expertly skilled, but the use of the word talent is not often used in conjunction with most skills.

Some could say that a grown man’s ability to outdo his young peers in a game of hopscotch is a display of talent, but most fellow adults watching this man hop from square to square would suggest that he should consider finding a more constructive use of his abilities, if he wants others to consider him a talent.

Merriam-Webster defines talent as “a special ability that allows someone to do something well.”

Philosopher Ayn Rand steadfastly refused to recognize photography as art, but she did concede that it requires a skill, a technical skill, as opposed to a creative one.

We all know that definitions, such as these, can be broad, but most of us have personal definitions that fall on stricter lines. If the definition of talent is as broad as Merriam-Webster described, and photography requires some technical skill, then we should concede that taking a quality photograph does require some talent. One could also say that a talented photographer uses discretion and selectivity when he selects his shot, but could this ability to capture a moment be nothing more than a right place, right time decision? Some of them don’t even display that. They take ten to twenty photos and display the perfect one.

If one takes a hundred different photographs, and only one of them is of an exceptional quality, is that a display of the photographer’s skill? Yes it is, in a broad sense of the term. If that’s the case, we could say that if a man takes a hundred free throws and only makes one, he has a talent for shooting free throws, if that one free throw is so perfect that it barely touches the net.

If a photographer purchases a top of the line camera, and he uses the best photo-enhancing software available to produce evidence of his prowess, and he lays that photo down on a table next to the photo of another taken with a disposable Walmart camera, and no enhancements are permitted, does his superior photo reveal God-given talent on his part, or does it contribute to the lie that a skilled, talented photographer is artistically talented?

The Truly Talented

We’ve all witnessed the effect truly talented people can have on a room, and this effect often makes us a little sick. “He’s just a human being for God’s sakes!” is one of the snarky, coping mechanisms we’ve developed for dealing with “the gush” to adore the talented.

The adoration of talent varies with the skill required to accomplish the feat, of course, but if you’ve ever met a truly gifted people, you know that most of them are not interested in being better today than they were yesterday. Most of them enjoy the potential they have to be better more than they do the work involved in becoming better. “We’re talking about practice!”

Those that become obsessed with being better, and enjoy the benefits the rigors of practice can produce, often end up having their names etched into something by the time they’re finished. These few don’t necessarily bathe in adulation, they focus on one on one battles. When they get beat, and everyone gets beat, they do things that the overwhelming majority of us avoid to get better. For the overwhelming majority, sports, artistic endeavors, and all the venues that require talent involve moments. The talented enjoy those moments for what they are, when they happen, but the people who will have their names etched into something take it home with them. For these people, their talent is but a starting point and a gift that they end up honing to perfection, but even for these people talent can be a curse and a burden, and it can lead to acceptance, love, worship, and being scrutinized, ostracized, hated, and ridiculed. The idea of their talent, i.e. their potential, can also haunt them when they encounter its limitations.

An edition of 30 for 30 called Of Miracles and Men portrayed the other side of talent. It depicted the other side of the Miracle on Ice story that we all know of a ragtag group of American amateurs defeating the most talented Russian hockey team ever assembled. Some would argue that this Russian team might have been the greatest assemblage of hockey players ever to tie skates on their feet. This team had already won four Olympic gold medals in hockey, by the time they took to the ice against this American team, and some of them would go onto win a fifth after the 1980 defeat. To hear this group of talented men speak of their careers, the 1980 loss to a group of American amateurs, in a medal round, sits in their system like a kidney stone that will never pass. This Russian team beat an assemblage of Canada’s best that included probably the greatest hockey player that ever lived Wayne Gretzky. They also beat the 1980 American team in a match that preceded the 1980 medal round upset, and those two matches were not even close. This team was so dominant that they could not be beat, until they were.

Some would think that such an historic upset might serve to highlight the Russian team’s greatness, if one could say that one defeat in the midst of a record of total annihilation is a blip in the overall dominance this team displayed over the hockey world for two decades. Listening to these men speak, however, the listener gets a taste for the other side of talent when the only story anyone wants to hear from them involves the one time they didn’t succeed, and how that has haunted them since.

The point one could take from this 30 for 30 episode is that these men spent an excruciating amount of hours of their young lives in cold, dank gyms honing their God-given gifts, trying to improve on the smallest details of the game, only to fall to a bunch of ragtag Americans that may not have spent one-fifths the amount of time honing their gifts. Even with five gold medals (including the 1984 Olympics), the only thing we want to talk to them about is that one match they failed to win thirty-five years ago.

If you’re acknowledged as the most talented person anyone you know has ever met, and the only thing anyone wants to discuss is the one time you failed, why would you want to raise their expectations? Why would you want to endure the marathon practice sessions that focused on the minutiae your coach informed was going to be vital when you encountered the wall of your God-given abilities? Why would you want to invest more of your life becoming better at something other people hate you for being so good at? We’re talking about desire here.

We’re talking about the desire to be better today, than you were yesterday. “We’re talking about practice!” We’re talking about preparing for that day, that every talented person experiences, when they meet their personal wall.

The wall, for those that have never read about it, involves going up against other people that were the most talented people anyone they know had ever met. It involves seeing what the gifted person is made of when they encounter the another person loaded with so much talent that talent is afterthought.

To read the former NFL quarterback Kurt Warner’s examination of the natural talents that fail to succeed on the NFL level, it’s about having a coach, or mentor, early on that recognizes the person’s talent level, and challenges them in a brutal, heartless manner, to reach within themselves to find various other methods of succeeding beyond the talent level they’ve always known. This heartless mentor also helps the talented person in question determine if they have the desire to succeed on a level they may not have even considered to that point.

The Less Than Talented

“My talent has always been, and will always be, and it should be written with a capital ‘P’!” –Your Potential once said.

What if your talent has never taken you the places you thought it would, but you’ve always known you had the potential you had to succeed. What if your talent lays somewhere between being as talented as anyone that you’ve ever met, and perhaps more, but that untapped potential to be more has always remained at a frustrating distance?

We spoke of ‘the wall’ that every recognized talent experiences, but there is another wall that can be more formidable: the wall of self-imposed expectations. The talented might encounter this wall in moments considered inconsequential to other participants, and observers, but to the person that has lived with the idea that they’ve always had the potential to succeed it is but another example of their ineptitude. Most of them do not know that this is the source of their frustration, or if they do, they won’t acknowledge it.

As the Kurt Warner story informs us, the primary difference between those who will succeed and those that won’t occurs soon after they experience adversity. Moments of adversity can be large and small, but they all reveal who we are, and who we are going to be.

A young Kurt Warner may have dealt with moments of adversity throughout his largely undocumented young life, but we can guess that none of them would compare to the adversity that the adult Kurt Warner would experience in his adult life. The most talented person in his area received so few scholarship offers that he ended up playing quarterback for the University of Northern Iowa. The NFL draft did not draft him, following that college career, and the only team that gave him a try-out, cut him before the season even started. He ended up stocking shelves for a supermarket chain. He then played quarterback in the Arena Football League, and he had a stint in NFL Europe before an injury to a starter allowed him to start for a NFL team and lead them to a Super Bowl victory. He was MVP of that Super Bowl and MVP for the season. That Super Bowl team cut him a couple seasons later, and he went onto play for another NFL team for a couple of unproductive seasons, and he ended up with a team that he, again, guided to the Super Bowl. After Kurt Warner’s career concluded, he was considered to be the best undrafted free agent to ever play the game.

Kurt Warner’s story is one of not living up to his self-imposed expectations. It’s a story of what he did after failing to succeed on many levels. (After leading the St. Louis Rams to a Super Bowl victory, then a Super Bowl loss, he ended up on a New York Giants team that gave up on him in favor of future Hall of Fame starter Eli Manning. Warner then led the Arizona Cardinals to the Super Bowl.) It’s a story that should be held out as an example to talented people, but for most of those that are more talented than anyone they’ve ever met, talent and work have always been a zero-sum game: The more talent one has, the less work they think they have to do.

Warner states that most coaches and mentors coach to the talent, and they let the talent do what they do well in a manner that the coach hopes will reflect the coach’s ability to harness talent. They coach for the next game. They coach to keep the talent happy.

If we’re talking about practice, however, one of a coach’s duties should be to put talented people in uncomfortable positions to reveal to them what they must do when talent alone may not be enough get them out of moments of adversity.

It also allows those talented people –that have always used their talent as a picket sign to avoid the rigors of practice– to learn how to finesse the minutiae of their abilities and hone their desire.

As anyone who has displayed an ability to do anything knows, there is always a ceiling, and when one hits their head on that ceiling it can be humbling and humiliating. Some of the times, it’s more rewarding to hide in a cloud of potential. Those of us considered lesser-thans don’t understand what it must feel like to have so many consider us a true talent, and we never will, and that can provide the talented a comfortable space between the reality of their talent and the potential we believe they might have.

If you’ve ever witnessed a display of YouTube-worthy temper tantrum in a bowling alley, on a miniature golf course, or at a softball field, and you’ve wondered why a person would attempt to gouge their own eye out after missing a two-foot putt, I can tell you –as a former wild temper tantrum thrower– that there’s something more to it than the idea that the ball doesn’t always go where we want it to go. We thought we spotted something at a very young age, we thought we were going to be a somebody, a contender, and the obnoxious five-pin that will not fall no matter what we do is not just a configuration of rock maple wood to us, it is the eye of fate staring at us, mocking us for not being able to fulfill the potential we thought we saw.

These eye-catching temper tantrums are borne of an inability to deal with even the most inconsequential moments of adversity, because we never had a heartless mentor who cared enough not to care that we were tired, that our feelings were hurt by something they said, or that we wanted to quit the game because “it’s just not fun anymore”. One could read this post, and think it’s all about sports, until they witness a guy who has no capacity for dealing with the obnoxious five-pins of life, and in the moment that captures his frustration in life for all to see, he does something to the ball return that causes parents to shield their kids’ eyes. For an overwhelming majority of those who would have their names etched into something by the time their career is over, their mentors would spend countless hours teaching them how to deal with such adversity, how to overcome walls –self-imposed and otherwise– and how to become successful people, and yes, talented photographers, I guess.

Rilalities VI

July 7, 2014July 11, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.” — Walker Percy

1) A Man on the Rise: We all have a formula for success, but how flawed are they? How many inconsequential matters make it into our formula? I met a man who achieved a relative level of success in life. The only problem was he didn’t know how to set an alarm clock, so I showed him … numerous times. Frustrated and embarrassed by this revelation, he stopped me and said, “Just give me a damned wake up call!” He looked at me with a bemused smile that contained shades of embarrassment. The shades of embarrassment suggested that he knew he should know how to do this by this point in his life, if he wasn’t a senior citizen he was close. Beneath that subtle shade of embarrassment was a bold confidence that suggested this moment didn’t bother him as much as I thought it should. I was so shocked that I could barely return a polite smile. I figured that someone, a mom, a wife, or a secretary obviously made sure his clocks ran on time. The man’s confidence, combined with this lack of knowledge, led me to share this moment with a number of people, until I finally ran into someone who knew who that feller was. “That man is the vice-president (VP) of one of the most prestigious companies in the world,” he said mentioning the name of the company in question.

It seemed unfair to me that a man who knows so much should achieve so little, while this near infant-of-a-man should rise to the upper reaches of our society. The difference between the two, life has taught me, is tunnel vision.

Long after meeting that VP, I met a man named Kelsey Anderson. As opposed to the specific knowledge that the VP gained, attained, and sustained, Kelsey was more of a generalist. “Okay, that man is just smart,” someone once said after spending some time in his company. “He is,” I said. “No doubt about that, but he has no direction. He’s never learned how to apply that knowledge in any productive way.” Kelsey and I spent about six months working next to each other in a big company, and my impression of him only strengthened over time.

The question is who is smarter, who’s more successful, and who has the better game plan? The VP obviously focused his more limited resources in one particular area, until he eventually succeeded beyond 99 percent of most men. Kelsey was an impressive intellect who could’ve taken that alarm clock apart and rebuilt it. He was one of those guys who appears to know a surprising amount of something about everything, but he had no particular area of focus, no direction, and thus no arena in which to display his prowess. His potential to succeed was unbound, and we all knew it. He knew it. The vice-president had comparatively limited resources, but he obviously learned his limitations early on, and he learned how to hone those few strengths he had to become what we all deem successful.

We’ve all witnessed impressive people before, but how many people do we know that are so impressive that their listeners cannot contain themselves? Most people try to find the one thing that is not impressive about the impressive, so that they can feel more comfortable in their less than impressive lives. Most people do not say things like: “What’s he doing here?” … among us?

“If someone were to just give me half-a-(durned) chance … ” Kelsey would complain when I complimented him on his intelligence. The compliment I gave didn’t please him. It made him more angry about his station in life. “I just-I have so many ideas … ” he complained. He knew so much, about so much, that he was an intimidating force of a man, but he had learned so little in life that he never found out how to capitalize on it. Watching him, one was left to wonder how many learned men in history had so much trouble harnessing their ability that they were deemed a failure by those that knew them? And how many lesser men learned how to harness their limited ability, until they achieved a place in history we all know well?

2) Framing an Argument: Have you ever found out that an overwhelming number of people disagree with something you’ve believed in for so long that it’s now an ingrained truth to you? Is this issue something that you hold so close to your heart, that it pains you to learn that so many disagree with you? The disagreements you’ve heard aren’t simple disagreements either, they’re profound, substantive disagreements that cause you to question everything you once held dear.

The first question that your like-minded cohorts will ask you is what is wrong? Even moral issues are relative when looked at in a certain light. There are no absolutes, they will say. You may love that answer for it falls in line with your philosophy, but it doesn’t satisfy the internal dilemma you’re experiencing, because the contradictory information pouring in is penetrating.

You simply need a course in framing, your like-minded cohorts will say. The art of framing employs the soul of wit: brevity. If you can frame your issue in the form of a sound bite, a lyric, one frame of one cartoon, or a couple of pictures, the world will be your oyster. The particulars of the argument may damn you to the point of being wrong on this particular issue, but you need not worry about the particulars when you’re framing. Your goal, in this the age of 140 words, is to succinctly portray your position in a manner that can be repeated, and shared, until you’re as close to right as you can possibly be without saying the wrong thing, and your brokenhearted brethren will like you for it.

3) LANGUAGE: I’ve always had a passing interest in the French language. When it’s fluently spoken, it can sound so rhythmic and beautiful. I was so taken by the language that I decided to take a college course in French. It became clear to me (about a month in) how passing that fascination was. I still enjoyed hearing the language though, and I’ve even tried my hand at using some of the language’s more exotic words with all of the umlauts, graves, and aigues in place. It was my goal to speak the language in a manner absent the mundane, specific-to-America renderings. The French word for accessories, accouterments, got a hold of me once, and I began using it as often as I could. It made me feel exotic and a little worldly when my English speaking friends would say, “What?”

“It means accessories,” I would say with a subtle amount of smugness that bathed in the exotic juices of knowing a little French. I finally ran into a native French speaker some time later, and I couldn’t wait to give the word a test drive. I used it in proper context, and I thought I had my elocution down. I had also used the word for years at that point, so I felt confident in the idea that I could now say it without the effort those that had never heard the word used.

When my native French speaking friend said: “What?” I was a little taken aback.

“Isn’t that French for accessories?” I asked.

He asked me to repeat it, and when he was able to pick himself up off the floor, he informed me that most non-native French speakers should just stick with the American renderings.

4) SELF-PROMOTION: Rarely will you read an author write, “I’d like to talk about myself now … ” They’re usually more creative than that, but some of them aren’t. Some of them should spend a little more time trying to creatively frame their indulgence a little better.

I recently put a book down that contained the words: “They don’t want Harlan Ellison messing around with that.” Speaking in the third person can be funny, and some of the times it can be an affectation of funny that leaves the reader thinking that they’re about to go down an unusually funny, self-defecating (sic) path, but this particular fork in the road was not a veiled attempt at humor, nor was it eventually self-deprecating. This was pure self-promotion. This was Harlan Ellison telling the reader that the establishment regards him as a dangerous rascal that keeps on mucking up the status quo to a point that they believe he must be constrained to maintain their precious military, industrial complex. They’re afraid of what Harlan Ellison might tell you, Harlan basically writes. They do not want Harlan speaking out, because they know that his powerful words can cause unrest. Harlan also wants you to know that the establishment, the man, doesn’t appreciate him speaking out, because they’re afraid of his thoughts, and he’s much more powerful than you know (or perhaps than he even knows), but the man knows, and they have tried to find some way of shutting him up. Either that, or the cynic in me believes, that Harlan wants you to feel like an outsider that doesn’t know how truly rascally Harlan can be, so you may want to buy more of his books to find out. When we buy a book, we do want to find out what an author thinks, and we’ve been tantalized by his thoughts through some other medium that led us to being so interested in his thoughts that we wanted to purchase a compendium of them, but when that author qualifies his thoughts in a manner that suggests that he believes that his thoughts are extravagantly provocative, some of us simply tune him out.

5) Quote: Recalling the fifty year anniversary of the legislation, George Will writes of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society: “In 1964, 76 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing just about always or most of the time. Today, 19 percent do. The former number is one reason Johnson did so much; the latter is one consequence of his doing so.”

‘P’ is for Potential

November 5, 2013October 23, 2022 RilalyLeave a comment

“You have to create some dung to fertilize the flower,” Martin Sheen said when he was asked how he could only be proud of three movies in a career that listed 69 titles.

The fact that this was my favorite quote, for years, should’ve told me something about the dreams I had of becoming a writer. I believed that I had a capital ‘P’ emblazoned on my chest, until I realized that everyone else did too, and I hadn’t done enough to separate myself from the pack. The thing with the ‘P’ word that those in the card carrying ‘P’ world don’t know is that there is another ‘p’ word in the vocabulary of those that watch you. This is an evil ‘P’ word to those in the card carrying ‘P’ world. That ‘P’ word is performance.

Some may have their ‘P’ word swinging before their face, in the manner a farmer puts a carrot on a stick before their horse. They may also wear it in every smile they give you, and those smiles tell you they are meant for something more, but they just don’t know what yet. When one runs across a true ‘P’ word, they know it when they see it, and it diminishes their capital ‘P’ a little by comparison. Most people are not unusually jealous, they’re happy, and they lead a great life, but when they run across one that carries a true ‘P’ on their various smiles, they decide that they would do just about anything for just one of those smiles.

When they speak of events that have occurred in their life, and they speak about them in a casual manner, the observer knows that the career that we currently share with them is just a way station for them, and we can’t help but be genuinely jealous in that moment.

Others wear this letter ‘P’ as a costume, in conversations, to cover for the fact that they haven’t achieved as much as they once thought possible. We’ll know these people when we see them too. All of these people teach us the various definitions of the ‘P’ word. We see the beauty in their smiles, and we perceive their limitlessness, but we’ll also see the evil ones. We’ll see that these definitions are defined by how the user uses it, and if they use it.

I thought I had a capital ‘P’ branded into my chest at one point. I didn’t. I thought I did though, and that thought prompted me to work my tail off to convince myself, and others, that it was truer than true. The idea that I pursued something, for which I had so little talent, amazes me now in retrospect, when I look back on the actual performances that convinced me that there was, at least, a lower case ‘P’ somewhere on my chest.

Those that manage their ‘P’ word correctly, rarely comment on it. They don’t have to say it. It is the conclusion their observers reach soon after getting to know them. Those that wear the letter ‘P’ on their chest, as a costume, know this also. They know that most in their audience are so loaded with insecurities that those insecurities can be translated into a variety of ‘P’ words, and ‘P’ word synonyms, if they do it right. In order to do it right, however, they know to avoid performing in front of them. Give them silence, and let them fill in the rest.

“I can’t hang out with those two anymore,” a friend of mine told me one day after an outing with co-workers. I initially thought he was being a cool guy. A cool guy tells those around them that a fun and exciting night was boring; a cool guy tells those around them that a great movie, or album, sucked; and a cool guy stops all the plastic people, with all of their plastic proceedings, and drops a quick quip like: “The world sucks!” Cool guys can also reveal those nerds around them by saying that what we thought was such a great time, was time spent with nerds. I attempted to dispel what I thought were my friend’s cool guy condemnations by saying that those two were fun and entertaining, and that fun and entertaining people don’t usually hang out with two drips like us. He said that wasn’t it. He said his concern was work-related.

I attempted to dispel this notion by saying that our company didn’t discourage senior agents hanging out with employees, only managers. My friend believed he was born with a capital ‘P’ on his chest, and I thought this was another moment where his delusions of grandeur had gotten away from him. “It’s not that,” he concluded. “It’s that, they know what I think now.” Here I thought that all the symptoms I was witnessing added up to the fact that my friend had come down with a simple case of delusions, but as it turned out he was suffering from a complex case of grand delusion.

What his last sentence told me was that he knew his thoughts were never as complex, or as complicated as he wanted them to be, but those two didn’t have to know that. He was despondent. They knew. He told them what he thought. All those weeks and months he spent quietly sitting in the background cultivating, harvesting, and weaving the idea of his brilliance into gold by allowing these people to fill in the blanks for him were gone, shattered, in one night.

He feared that the grand delusions he had perpetrated in their world, had just been popped, and he feared that when Monday rolled around, they would know that he was just one of them, in the present, with a future that probably wouldn’t be that much different than theirs. On Monday, they would see him quietly typing away at his keyboard, in an office, and that visual would take on an entirely different meaning than it had on the Friday before our weekend outing.

The other employees around him took their jobs less seriously. They always got their work done, but they played, and talked, and joked. He didn’t. He was serious. He even went so far as to shush employees when management walked by. He had always been a quiet guy with few friends, and in the real world this defined him as an awkward person that had a difficult time mixing with other people. In the office world, these characteristics can lead to an employee gaining a mystique of being a model employee with a serious future. That night, spent with our two co-workers, revealed him as more of a quiet, socially awkward guy that feared authority. It made everything he had done to procure those grand delusions in their head feel pointless.

He feared that they would now believe he was what they saw, nothing more. The idea that he didn’t mix well with others, was once a silence thing, but silence begets the ‘P’ word if one does it often enough and allows others to fill that silence in with their own exciting and intoxicating words. Why does he behave so well? Why doesn’t he mix well with others? I’ll tell you why, that boy’s got the ‘P’ word in spades. They fill that silence with words that you wouldn’t believe, until you accidentally fill those blanks in for them one night, while drinking, and there’s no turning back after that, or so he feared.

There were times when he spoke his mind during that night, and our two co-workers realized he didn’t know everything. He wasn’t as wise as they feared in their silent, insecure comparisons. There were other issues he wouldn’t discuss with them that he found too revealing, because he said he couldn’t discuss it with them. In the latter, he attempted to convey the notion that he had proprietary information that he could not divulge, due to his position in the company. When we reminded him that he was not management, and he could reveal whatever he thought on the matter without fear of recrimination, he went silent. It was revealed that he simply didn’t know what we were talking about. We accidentally took away his shield of silence. He thought these co-workers had given him a capital ‘P’ followed by an exclamation point, and he feared that that ‘P’ had replaced by an ‘R’ word, reality, that would shatter all the myths he had worked so hard to create.

My friend wanted to be like a politician that stood for nothing, but allowed his constituency to fill in the blanks that he left for them, until they had other ‘P’ words dancing in their head, and ‘P’ words that had question marks behind them, as opposed to his preferred exclamation point.

The thing with the ‘P’ word is that it can be beautiful. It can drive a person to become better tomorrow than they are today, if they’re willing to engage in the naughty ‘p’ word of the ‘P’ world vocabulary, performance. The reason that most card carrying ‘P’ words regard performance as a naughty word is that performing can lead to another ‘R’ word, revelation. It can reveal if the card carrying member truly has a ‘P’ word or not. It can tell reveal whether a person is truly special, gifted, and meant for more, or if they’re just a regular guy, collecting a regular paycheck, with as many limits on your ‘P’ word as everyone else.

I identified with my friend. I thought I had a capital ‘P’ behind my name that was followed by a big, old gleaming exclamation point. I thought God whispered things in my ear, and I wrote down everything I heard. I wrote short stories. I wrote novels. I wrote anything and everything I could fit in one mind. I thought it was my job in life to see this calling to its end. I thought I was a few steps below Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz, and Robert McCammon. I thought I just had to perform my way through that hole.

I’ve read through all those whispers recently, and I realize that if they happened today, I would turn to my wife and say, “I just had a thought.” I would then say those two sentences, and be done with it. Back then, a part of me believed that those whispers were telling me to be a writer, and I listened to these whispers, until I had enough material that it should’ve come true, and then I wrote some more, until I reached a point where I may have fertilized that ground so well that all the cultivating, harvesting and turning of those lies might have accidentally produced a truth.