Quote of the Day - Diligence

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence. – Samuel Johnson

I write. A lot. Every day. It is easy. I am good at it.

Is it easy because I am good at it or am I good at it because it is easy?

Actually, neither. It is easy and I am good at it because I write a lot every day - and have been doing so for over 60 years.

Even in grade school I wrote a lot. Short stories, history papers, game rules. By middle school I was doing term papers and editing newsletters (which at that age, meant I was writing most of them). I was the communications office for my Civil Air Patrol cadet squadron in my early teens (which meant I wrote the press releases) and in high school and college I edited wargaming fanzines and wrote wargaming scenarios. I also rewrote wargames rules for friends to make them readable.

When I graduated from college as an engineer, I became the guy in the group that wrote the reports, and later the manuals. In the first four years in the field I published around a dozen professional papers. I edited the JSC Astronomical Society's newsletter for several years. Later I wrote general interest magazine articles and later books. Fifty books, so far.

Do you think it came easy? Think again.

I have copies of my early writings. (Thanks to my parents, who kept some of the early school papers.) They sent one story I wrote in 4th or 5th grade to an uncle who was an ad man in New York City to see if it could be published. (It wasn't. I got a long letter back from someone in the publishing industry explaining why.) I have a few of the early newsletters I did in high school and college.

They stink. Really. The individual who reviewed my story was right. It was unpublishable. Some of my writings were good for the age I wrote them. And yes, I improved over time. But I improved because I kept writing. I was diligent, writing almost every day. And with practice came ease. Until finally, in the 1990s, people were willing to pay me for what I wrote.

It is true. You do something enough every day for long enough and it gets easy. Whether it is writing, ship modeling, carpentry, playing a musical instrument, or shooting hoops. You may not become NBA or NFL great, you may never play in Carnegie Hall, but you become better than 85 percent of everyone else. I have never been a New York City published author or bestselling author, but I can produce four publishable books annually working weekends and evenings.

Pretty much everyone can achieve that level of competence in virtually any field given diligence in exercising their skills in that field. The trick is to realize how bad you will be when you start off, and persevere regardless. When I first started making model ships it was hard and I was horrible at it. But I continued doing it and eventually became good at that, too.

Diligence is the gateway to doing anything with ease.