Swing as hard as you can

I once watched a video in which an average guy tried to hit a 95 MPH fastball.

Before he tried, he met with professional baseball players and coaches, and got trained in a state-of-the-art facility

Near the end of the video, one of the hitting coaches told him to stop trying to hit the ball. “I want you to swing harder than you’ve ever swung in your life…[but] don’t try to hit the ball.” 

The coach threw the guy a pitch. The guy swung as hard as he could. He hit the ball really hard. 

It was an interesting exercise. When the guy was aiming for the ball, he was swinging slower, and wasn’t making hard contact. But when the coach told him to only focus on swinging hard, he made contact anyway. It was the hardest contact he made all day. 

Recently I was talking to my cousin about what we focus on as creatives and filmmakers. We try to focus on everything: making good work, and making a lot of money, and treating our clients well, and finding work-life balance, and having a good brand. 

When we focus on all of it, we aren’t really swinging that hard at any of it. We’re just trying to “not miss” on any of them. But we make weak contact with everything. Instead, if we tried to “swing as hard as we could” on just one of these things, the others would sort themselves out on their own. 

If your only goal was to make as much money as you could, you would treat your clients really well, because long-term relationships are more profitable. The quality of your work would increase, because better work earns bigger checks.

If your only goal was to have exceptional client relationships, your work would get better as well, because great work makes happy clients. 

If your only goal was work-life balance, the “making money” part would figure itself out too, because all your jobs would have to be lucrative and profitable in order for you to pay the bills. 

We think these things are mutually exclusive, but they’re not. Excellence in one area often draws out excellence in another. It’s the constant switching from priorities and the lack of focus that leads to poor performance all around.