Mini Think #1: Jerry Rice, Toni Morrison, and Paul Graham

Rice was a bust, Morrison arrives before the light, and Graham can fly

Typically, 1GT profiles a good thought from one good thinker (like Steve Martin or Sebastian Maniscalco or Oprah). But once every few thinks, I’ll throw in a Mini Think. This is the first.

A Mini Think is a little fact or quote or interesting perspective from a thinker I felt too small to write a 1GT on, but too good to let go. I’ll offer three of them in each edition.

First up: (1) Hall of Fame NFL Wide Receiver Jerry Rice, (2) entrepreneur and essayist Paul Graham, and (3) Nobel prize winning author Toni Morrison.

(1) Hall of famer Jerry Rice was a bust

Jerry Rice is one of the best wide receivers ever.

But, in his book Go Long!, he tells how in the first few months of his rookie season, he kept dropping wide open passes. It was so bad, he was labeled a bust by most pundits, and was even booed in Candlestick Park (his home stadium).

In the first eleven regular season games, I dropped eleven passes. The media began to question my ability and the 49ers’ draft…Nicknames like ‘Butterfingers’ began to to crop up and the word ‘bust’ was used more often than I care to remember.

After some particularly bad games, I retreated to the locker room and sat on a stool and just cried in front of my teammates and coaches.

The problem, he tells us, was obviously not his physical ability— Rice was one of the best receivers in the NCAA the year prior— but his head.

I realized years later that I was just so eager to make big plays and prove myself that I lost focus on the little things—like catching the ball. I was so concerned with what I did after the catch, I couldn’t even make the catch.

Eventually, Rice realized this problem (and some other financial and family concerns that had been hanging over his head) and had his breakout game in December of that year, when he had over 200 yards and three touchdowns in one game.

(2) Nobel prize winning author, Toni Morrison, arrives before the light

Toni Morrison is a noble laureate and won the Pulitzer price for Beloved (which I wrote about here).

In her interview with The Paris Review, Morrison talks about her little ritual to get in her best writing mindset:

I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come….this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular . . . Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition.

It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.

And she tells her students to find their ritual:

I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?

(3) How entrepreneur Paul Graham got over his fear of flying

Paul Graham first got famous in the late 90s after selling his startup Viaweb to Yahoo! for $50 million.

His fame continued when he started Y-Combinator, a startup accelerator and seed investor that funded companies like DropBox and AirBnB. But his most enduring contribution may be his essays which are phenomenal.

Recently, in an interview with economist, Tyler Cowen, Graham told how he got over his fear of flying: by learning how to hang glide.

If you’re afraid of flying, how could you learn how to hang glide? The answer is, you learn how to hang glide gradually. You start by just running along the flat. If there’s a headwind, maybe you feel a little lift. Then you go 10 feet up the hill, run as fast as you can, and you reach a total altitude above ground level of like a foot. You’re not afraid when you’re a foot above the ground. You go out a little further up the hill until a month later, you’re jumping off a cliff with a hang glider on your back.

After I was good at hang gliding, I took flying lessons. There’s this intermediate point where I was totally comfortable jumping off a cliff with a hang glider on my back, moderately comfortable flying a Cessna 172 — where the instructor had just turned off the engine [laughs] and said, “Okay, land it,” because the glide ratio is actually similar to a hang glider — and still afraid of getting on an airliner.

…when I finally did get on an airliner, my God, it was like a spaceship [laughs] compared to the planes I’d been flying. It was fabulous. It totally worked. My fear of flying was completely cured.

That’s the first MT. We now know how to catch a pass, start a book, and overcome fear of flight. Not bad for a Mini.

Let me know what you think.