About a decade ago, I made a commitment to start writing more on danoshinsky.com. It was a small thing — the goal, at first, was just to have a place to write. I was in a job at the time that involved a lot of technical writing (subject lines, captions, stuff for SEO), but I wanted a place where I could do my own thing and share what I was learning.
So I made a commitment to write once a week.
And one of things you learn when you start writing once a week is that some posts are good, some are great, and some are lousy.
But you also learn: By taking more swings, you have more chances for success.
Let’s lean into the baseball analogy here. Let’s say I hit .300 on my posts — three out of every 10 posts is something I’m super proud of. More swings means more opportunities for success.
A hit rate of .300 on 12 posts means I’d have four hit posts a year.
But by writing weekly, I’ve got 52 posts — which means a hit rate of 17 posts.
Could I go further? Maybe I could up my outage of posts. If I somehow wrote 365 posts — and I feel dizzy just thinking about writing that much — I’d have 109 hits in a year. (Though honestly, if I wrote that much, I wonder if my hit rate would naturally go down. More output doesn’t mean I’d be consistent with the quality of my writing.)
But the point is: It’s a good thing to take more swings. Not everything is a hit, and that’s OK. But every time I take a swing, I’ve got a chance to do something great.
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I took that photo at a San Antonio Missions minor league baseball game back in May 2010. The pitcher is Simon Castro, who went on to pitch parts of three seasons in the majors with the Chicago White Sox, Colorado Rockies, and Oakland Athletics.