The Midas Touch

“If you knew that anything you wrote would be published and successful, what would you write?”

From Jim

My last book. I would quit writing.

There would be no challenge. No wondering or hoping or wanting. There would be no dream. I can’t imagine a more dreary life. Who wants to end up like Midas?

Bear in mind that a superstar hitter in baseball only succeeds about thirty percent of the time. How boring if batting became a conga line.

And since we’re on sports now, if I knew that every shot I took on the basketball court would go in the hoop, I’d quit that too. And golf? Imagine if every shot were a beauty? Every putt in the center of the cup? I think I’d end up cheating against myself.

Even the NFL understood that extra points had become too automatic so they changed the rules. Much more interesting now that it’s no longer a chip shot.

And soccer? If they wanted to make it easy to score, they would have made the goal bigger, tied goalies’ hands behind their backs, and never come up with the offsides rule.

That said, I wouldn’t mind hitting 52% of my shots on the court and maintaining a two or three handicap on the links. And, I would love to sell more books. But if a genie promised me that everything I wrote would be a wild success, I’d lose interest in heartbeat.

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.”
—T. Roosevelt