"Aw Son,
Just HIT the Thing."
By Charles Burke
I think my father had his doubts about how I'd
turn out. He was always "encouraging" me to stop thinking so much
and take direct action. But I was a slow learner in that area.
Most of us learn early that even with luck on
our side, we've got to put some real effort into our goals if
we want to reach them.
But even in the smaller, more routine activities
of life, we've got to put some spine into it. Otherwise, we'll
fail, but not the big, dramatic failures where we KNOW we've run
aground.
Worse, we often only half-fail. Then we'll coast
along, kidding ourselves that things aren't really so bad... that
things could be worse... and they MIGHT get better... mightn't
they?
Half-floundering like this can go on for decades,
and we've all seen it squeeze the life from careers, businesses,
marriages.
If you were lucky, you learned the lesson about
gumption early on, but for many of us, that lesson didn't come
until we had our noses rubbed in it a number of times. Or maybe
we're still learning it.
Of course, it's true that there's a proper time
for thinking, weighing and analyzing. And it should be done very
thoroughly. But once that phase is past - if we've done it right
- the analyzing should make way for action. Thinking too long
can leave us waiting until-this or until-that happens.
These days my work is mostly on the Internet.
But there's one principle that I use nearly every day.
And I learned it from my dad almost 40 years
ago in a very different line of work.
My father ran a plumbing shop in the competitive
western Chicago suburbs. Now and then, when a man didn't show
up or called in sick, he'd ask me to fill in for one or another
of his regular laborers. I wasn't union, but apparently it was
okay. He had friends.
One day he set me to work breaking a concrete
floor. We had to chip out the cement around a drain, replace it,
and trowel in new cement to seal it.
Now, you need to understand. My father was built
like a tree stump, while I ran more along the lines of beanpole.
I was not his favorite worker because I "thought too much and
wasn't very strong."
This floor breaking job was not the kind of work
I enjoyed. It involved holding a cold chisel and swinging a five-pound
baby sledge hammer at it really hard. Often my aim was bad so
the hammer missed the chisel and slammed into my wrist instead.
About ten minutes after he put me to work breaking
the floor, dad came back, expecting to find the job completed.
It wasn't.
"Son, just what the heck have you been doing
all this time?"
"Well, dad," I told him proudly, "I figured out
a good way to do this more safely. I just tap the chisel and move
it, tap it and move it. I'm generating a circle of shock waves
down into the concrete. That way, it'll break along the lines
and I won't hurt my wrist again."
Dad gave me a truly worried look. He said, "Aw
son, just HIT the thing."
Well, I did hit it then. And the job only took
five more minutes to finish. Oddly enough, even though I managed
to hammer my hand two or three times, I was proud that I'd just
gone ahead and done it.
Of course, Dad did practice what he preached.
He had a whole quart jar on his dresser at home filled with broken
watches that he'd smashed doing exactly what he was advising me
to do. He kept them as a reminder, he said, that if you'll just
go ahead and do the job, you can afford to buy all the watches
you need.
But the lesson I learned that day has never left
me.
And even today, nearly 40 years later, when I'm
tapping tentatively away on the edges of some job or other, trying
to launch a new website without making any mistakes, or trying
to figure out which script I need to install but I'm reluctant
to invest the time to just install one and see what it does, I
still sometimes hear my father's voice:
"Aw son, just HIT the thing."
When I hear that, I have to grin because he's
still urging me to take action, be less cautious. Just go ahead
and get the job done, never mind the bumps and bruises.
And that's not a bad lesson to carry through
life.
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