I know it’s kind of corny, but I’m a fan of inspirational phrases. No, not Joel Osteen-like or The Secret-type inspirational phrases, but blue-collar ones that remind me of my high school’s weight room. Please, bear with me here.
During the summer, before the football season started, I spent several hours a week pushing weights with my hamstrings, quads, chest, biceps, triceps and stomach. (I also dragged monster truck tires 30 yards, but who’s keeping track?)
I must say, I got pretty good at lifting — second highest bench max on the team senior year [looks at nails]. I left so much sweat in that room. But there were days when the grind got to me. A third set? Are you kidding me? (Because it was high school and I hung out with football players, I may have added the gerundive form of a certain four-letter word to that phrase, between the “you” and the “kidding.”)
On days like that, I’d look to the south wall. A mirror the length of the wall and maybe 10 feet high adorned that wall. (OK, I admit it: I checked myself out a few … dozen times during each workout — I was in high school!) Above the mirror was a white, rectangular sign with blue lettering. It read, and I’ll never forget this, “The more you sweat in times of peace, the less you bleed in times of war.”
(If you search the Internet, variations of this saying abound. It’s credited to Gen. George S. Patton and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, among others. My football coach always said Geronimo uttered it. Anyway.)
Obviously, war was a game or a season; peace was those summer workouts. I still think back to it in my everyday life, though. Instead of lifting weights for football games, I prep for interviews by researching as much as I can, writing down questions and practicing saying them, and sometimes playing out scenarios for certain questions in my head.
The saying holds true. I was reminded of this today, actually. A source called me back when I wasn’t prepared for the phone call. The stick of lead in my mechanical pencil had been whittled down so much that, near the end of the interview, I had to write with the pencil perpendicular to my notepad. I had to cut the interview short because I couldn’t write anymore.
I was bleeding, bad. When I hung up, I wondered why my workout clothes still smelled good.
Another favorite phrase of mine came, not from football, but from my J2100 teacher, Judd Slivka. In one of the third-floor computer labs in the Neff Annex, on either the first or second day of class, he told us to “embrace the suck.” (I’m sure I giggled because, as a sophomore, sophomoric humor, intentional or not, was a favorite past time.)
He said it after a rather lengthy preamble about dealing with the stress, or the sucky-ness, of the class. If journalism is what you want to do, I remember him saying, embrace the suck. The class did suck, in a good way. I learned a ton.
That phrase is now on my wall, on a sheet of paper, written in sharpie. Next to it, in the same format, is a phrase my editor, Liz, emailed me in the last few weeks of my Missourian reporting semester. “Keep going.” I take that as “don’t quit working hard to accomplish your goals,” only in a more positive way because it doesn’t have the word “quit” in it.
A new favorite inspirational phrase, though, came from an unlikely source.
Chris Jones, the Esquire and ESPN the Magazine writer, tweeted a link the other day to some dude’s blog, saying it was rules for freelance writers. So I clicked, you know, just in case I’m ever in that position. I read through them, then read through them again. And once more.
The dude (he actually seems pretty successful, based on the list of books on his blog) has 15 ways to survive as a freelancer. All of them are worth looking at, but the one that stuck with me the most was number three.
“Ass in chair.”
Yep, get your ass in a chair and write. Just do it. Don’t make excuses. Ass in chair. That’s just so gerundive brilliant.
I’ve already went back to this phrase this week. I had some writer’s block, and I just pushed through it because I sat in a chair and just wrote something. It’s not great, but now I have something to work off of. (Liz would call it a sh*tty first draft.)
The list, as you might have guessed, is on my wall, next to the other two. I printed it out though.
Embrace The Suck. Keep Going. Ass In Chair.
The phrases make my bedroom (or any room, I guess) my weight room.
Behind Blue Skies 