As the deadline of April, 1971 neared, our office fell
into somewhat of a routine. I still walked to work, my Navy raincoat assisting at times.
I still read at night and was teaching myself touch-typing. Having finished my
research on the Hot Springs office market, Tom let me try my hand at writing
the report. I bought myself a brand-new BIC pen and went to work.
On this project, I first encountered a mental process that
has blessed, plagued, and tormented me nearly 50 years. I often feel I can do
anything, if I just set my mind to it. As this feeling now embedded itself into
my psyche, I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. Beautiful stuff it seemed to me. I
would make the profession proud. I wrote some more. Was there a Pulitzer Prize for planning reports?
With the gleam of self-satisfaction in my eyes, I handed my finished
work to the typist and returned to supervising. A couple of days later, she handed
the draft back for review.
It was awful, terrible, and filled with flowery claptrap,
more a cheap imitation of Daphne du Maurier than a technical piece. I think Tom
left one sentence intact, the rest died under a blood-like film of red ink.
Would that I had kept the edited copy. It could occupy a spot in the museum
they may build someday in my honor.
It did make me appreciate both humility and simple, declarative sentences.
Perhaps life flourishes best in the invigorating and nutritional mixture of failure
and re-trying. I still lack writing skills, but I did learn to distrust
adverbs. That’s a good start.
Anyway, we continued to finish project after project and the
bosses were happy. What else could I ask for in life?
On morning, I arrived at work early and finished my
“Bear Claw” and coffee well before time for the others to arrive. I had perused most of the
morning paper and decided to address a personal failure that had eluded me
since I was 11 or 12 years old: solving the daily cryptoquote in the Arkansas
Gazette.
This morning, something nudged a dormant set of cognitive genes
and I felt a rush of insight. I had been going at it all wrong. The solution
lay in patterns and forms rather than formula. As my heart pounded, the words, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will
go far – Theodore Roosevelt,” appeared in pencil notes and erasure marks
above the lines of gibberish.
Hot damn!
It began a lifetime of returning, from time to time, to
attacking the daily offering, still carried in the dailies, particularly when I
feel my mind needs exercise. I mention the event here only because it taught me
that any success, no matter how small or trivial, builds a successful attitude.
And boy, did I have one at that point in my life. Cocky I was. Lessons to learn
I faced.
That day, though, we applied some extra enthusiasm and
completed two more of the projects. Tom came by late in the afternoon, saw the
progress, and called me into his office.
Having bade me sit, he formed his fingers and make a tent
and stared at them. After a moment, he looked up. “Looks like,” he said, “we
may accomplish something that, quite frankly, I never thought would happen.”
I smiled and said nothing.
He smiled back and said, “I think we’ll raise your salary
another hundred dollars a month.”
“Thank you.”
“But don’t expect a raise every month in the future.”
“I won’t.”
Like hell I wouldn’t.
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