If every shot on the pool table were over a short distance where the balls lined up perfectly with the pocket that you were aiming for, then pool would be a very boring game. Everyone would be pretty good at it and it wouldn’t be particularly fun. It would be like tic tac toe. Thankfully, not every shot in pool is like that. And it’s exactly when you meet with the challenging shots that pool becomes more interesting because it is then that you learn to take and make the challenging shots. No one would shoot a bank shot if they didn’t have to. But when you make a bank shot, or a combo shot or a jump shot, it’s especially satisfying. All activities and challenges and rewards are like this. Soccer would not be as exciting or fun if there were no goalkeepers. It would be too easy to score.
So the next time you come across a challenge, be glad and grateful for it. It will make you a better person in the game of life. You don’t have to wait for the challenges to come to you. And you shouldn’t. You should seek them out. When you’re bored, that’s a sign that it’s time to go looking for new challenges.
Once I played pool with someone whose accuracy amazed me. He wasn’t just getting the balls in the pockets—he was placing them in the dead center of the pocket. He was far more accurate than he needed to be. Later, I found out that played snooker, which is similar to pool except that the pockets are farther away, much smaller, and have curved edges on either side of the pocket rather than straight, angled edges on either side of the pocket like on a pool table. These factors make it much more difficult to put a ball in a pocket in snooker. Because he was accustomed to playing in the more challenging conditions of snooker, pool was easy for him. I didn’t stand a chance.
Tennis pro Michael Chang was known for being good at returning serves. He used to practice by returning serves from his brother who was serving at him from the middle of the court rather than from the end of the court where his opponents would always be serving from during tournament play. This meant that the ball would reach the net about twice as quickly as normal, forcing him to react more quickly. When match day came, he was ready because he practiced in harder conditions than match conditions. It’s harder to breathe in higher altitudes, so that’s where runners train. Top athletes seek out challenges because they know that that’s how you grow as an athlete and that’s how you prepare for future tests. If you want to be good at something, then seek out the very challenging conditions. Hills make heroes.
I remember the first day that I went down an expert level black diamond run on my snowboard. I was snowboarding with my cousin and he was a good skier but I was an average snowboarder. He wanted to go down an advanced black diamond run. I didn’t. When he suggested that we go down the advanced run, I protested somewhat, “I don’t know, I’ve never done a black diamond run before,” to which he replied, “Well, that’s gotta happen someday, right?” He was right. And it happened that day, at his suggestion. I wasn’t comfortable. I fell almost immediately. I was scared. But I had already passed the point of no return. My options were either to go down this hill on very slowly on my butt or to figure out how to go down it on a snowboard. So I started paying attention to why I was falling and I soon figured out that I needed to lean forward so that I could keep my center of gravity over my board and keep control of it long enough to turn and slowly do switchbacks down the mountain, making going down the steep mountain a less harrowing experience. In the end, it was a good thing and I’m glad I did it. When you stretch yourself and your goals a little bit, you give yourself the chance to go farther than you’ve ever gone before.
Embrace your constraints. Constraints are what give you problems. And problems give birth to beautiful solutions. The woman quickly solving a Rubik’s cube blindfolded with her feet is more impressive than the woman solving a Rubik’s cube with her eyes open using her hands because there are more constraints in the first situation. When tennis players swing the racket between their legs in order to hit the ball, it is out of necessity and it is impressive. They have no other good choice in that situation. When soccer players do bicycle kicks, it is because there is no other way to strike the ball in midair with such force. The ball is in the air and they want to kick it, so they throw their legs up there to meet it.
So if you don’t have enough money or time or know the right people to do what you want to do, then be glad that you are in the middle of such a big problem. There will be a beautiful solution. It’s when your back is against the wall that you can use the wall to give you strength.
As the poet David Ignatow has noticed: Flowers grow right out of concrete sidewalk cracks.
“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
—Albert Einstein
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