What Makes a Winner
One vital prerequisite of improving your SSH status
To paraphrase the late, great Sean Connery in what was unquestionably his greatest film:
“Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and become intimately acquainted with the prom queen.”
The metaphor was more than a little bizarre, given that Connery’s character was British and had been locked up in a maximum security prison for thirty years. And a queen at the Proms is something very, very different than a popular girl attending an American high school. But regardless, the bon mot contains an essential core of truth, which may explain why it became the most popular quote from a movie that featured nearly as many excellent quotes as it did over-the-top explosions.
Allow me to further paraphrase:
Losers always come up with a way to avoid putting in the effort required. Winners take the shot.
There is always a perfectly good excuse for not attempting something. For example, I had a very good excuse not to join a band with three of my friends over the summer during college: I was already working full-time, the only instrument I played was a bit of piano, and all three of them were very good pianists and singers. I was almost entirely superfluous. I joined the band anyhow, learned how to play a little bass, and we parlayed that into the four of us getting paid to put on a very successful concert at a popular Minneapolis dance club at the end of the second summer.
That performance led to a friendship with the club owner, who that winter introduced me to a very talented musician and singer. Two years later, that very talented musician and I had become good friends and we began writing songs together. Two years after that, two of our singles were on the Billboard Club charts and we had even beaten out Prince, who was one of the other nominees, for a local music award.
At no point did I ever worry about the fact that literally every other recording artist we knew on the Minneapolis scene was vastly more talented than me and orders of magnitude better at playing their instruments than I was at playing either bass or keyboard. Even at that relatively young age, I understood it was the end result that mattered; the only important thing is to get there, however you have to scratch and claw in order to do it.
Now I’m in a very good cover band; you can listen to some of our covers on Spotify if you’re so inclined. I even sing on four of them. But my primary musical interest is in lyrics and composition, which obviously isn’t possible with covers. Fortunately, AI systems are almost perfectly attuned for musicians possessing my particular lack of talents, which is how I’ve been able to write dozens of original songs in the last six months, by using AI to assist with the composition and do the heavy lifting of actually “playing” the instruments.
What’s been interesting to observe is the way in which it tends to be the non-musicians who scorn the new technology and regard it as being somehow less than legitimate, whereas the musicians either fear it or fully embrace it. It’s basically a composer’s dream, as one can run through scores of variants on a theme in an hour, and accomplish in a week what used to take us all summer.
Now, a loser’s mentality could produce at least a dozen reasons why I shouldn’t dare to put this new music out there. After all, who wants to listen to music by the least-talented member of a long-forgotten techno band from the early 1990s that isn’t even actual music written or recorded by human beings, right? And the technology is in its infancy; it’s very idiosyncratic and far from perfect.
But you cannot win if you don’t enter the arena. And to be honest, I truly don’t give the slightest fragment of a rat’s posterior about the opinions of anyone on the matter except those of the three best musicians that I know. And all three of them not only like the results, they’re fascinated that someone who they know with absolute certainty doesn’t possess a minute fraction of their various talents has been able to produce listenable results even at this early stage of the technology.
If you want to be a winner, you simply have to take your shot. There is no other way to succeed that doesn’t involve selling your soul. Which is why, starting on Thursday, I’ll be releasing no less than ELEVEN (11) songs on all the various music platforms over the next week. Perhaps people will like a few of them. More likely, they’ll disappear into the constant flow of new music without a trace. Either way, it doesn’t matter in the context of this post. The lesson, as always, is this: if you want to win, you have to play the game.
Take the risk. Take the shot. That’s the prerequisite. The only guarantee is that if you don’t, you will miss your window of opportunity.
On the 11 of June of this year, this teller started Snowy Hearts. He didn't have a backlog of fresh stories, only some from the days than he had his own wordpress site. As of December there's a total of 366 posts, the majority of these are fresh.
For years, he was just rotting in the pit of despair and inaction, not even playing all the games he had, essentially on metaphorical life support.
Now, he's even sculpting again, daily, even in the days of writing on his old personal website that never happened.
Of course, it would be best if he had a grand backlog of stories, if all his ducks were in a row, if he was firing on all cylinders, having triumphed fully over the bad habits that years of decomposition makes.
However to do anything at all, when you are in that pit, is triumph.
Currently, with 'The little Drummer Bird' This teller finally feels the vitality of his youth self who breathed out stories with each breath is within grasp.
This teller understands he shall not be as great as the greats even if he cleans out his rotten wounds, but to even be a 'John C. Wright at home' would be glorious still, to be below that even when so many creators are so low a bar to clear...
Everything above being entertaining is a wonderful bonus.
At any time, this teller could give up and go back to the pit, to rot, die and be forgotten.
Though he clearly struggles still, this teller thanks God and all the mortals that helped move him.
For years, it felt as if he would never move forward again, never accomplish anything, just dying in that ghastly pit.
Now, his fingers are white and bleeding, gripping the lip, burdened by the choices he made, he might wonder if he'll ever become more productive, but less than a year ago, he was still in that damned pit.
You see, he knows...
If you never give up, a time will come.
In short, this teller recommends taking the shot.
10/10 beats slowly decomposing each time.
Wishing to get ahead and be more productive and organised is a happy wish when your previous wish was to be doing anything, anything at all.
So, take the shot, and even if you don't get the goal, don't give up.
So long as one does those two things, you'll be somewhere and the hold of the pit will loosen.
The air up here on the mouth of the pit is nice, how much more crisp and fresh will it be to stand proud at pit's mouth?
"The lesson, as always, is this: if you want to win, you have to play the game."
Amen. I bootstrapped a software company from my basement starting when I was 33. Over the next 15 years I ran it up to more than a million in revenue/month, creating solid software solving large, complex problems across a wide variety of industries. It's a pretty good bet that you've used software developed by that company. Starting in 2007, a competitor used a corrupt federal judge to destroy it all via lawfare, ending in 2010, four years of lawsuit hell, eventually slashing my net worth by over 90%, and leaving me with the IRS chasing what little I had left.
The most disappointing part of the entire ordeal was having people I'd known for thirty years contemplating what I must've done wrong to have a federal court destroy my life's work. They simply could not bring themselves to believe the extent of the judicial corruption, even those who were intimately involved in my business. It's certainly an extreme edge case, thankfully, but this experience has transformed this natural alpha into at least the life pattern of the sigma, for better or worse.
Experiencing rank injustice changes a man profoundly. I'm not proud that it took me nearly a year to start putting one foot in front of the other again, but I eventually did. I'm very happy to report that I started a software company with my youngest son six years ago. It was an arduous start, but we've doubled in revenue three years in a row and we're going to double again in 2025. If I don't age out we should exceed my old company's revenue in 2028 with fewer than half as many people and much higher profit. Lord willing, my goal is to have this company helping my children's children's children long after I'm gone. Time will tell.
What have I learned? The world really is a testing ground, not Heaven, and God is ever faithful, using adversity to mold His people, creating warriors out of mere men. Take courage!
Afterword: The man who instigated the theft died young, five years ago, not of my hand. And God will deal with the corrupt judge and his other accomplices in His own good time. I sleep deeply and well.