Jackie Robinson didn’t just step into the field and turn segregation over its head. He was booed, jeered, taunted. One of the terms in his contract was not to complain when he was spat on.
Dan Pink’s book To Sell is Human is a must-read if you are seeking to improve your ability to sell. It has numerous exercises that help you get better at selling. You can do yourself a favor and download the workbook for the book here and do the exercises enlisted.
The first exercise in the book is designed by an improvisational theater expert Cathy Salit called Time Traveler. It’s a fascinating exercise, One that I actually tried it with a colleague. After we began, we realized just how incredibly hard it was to step into the shoes of someone who lived 300 years ago.
Just for a moment, forget going back centuries.
Let’s go back a mere 64 years, to a sport called baseball and a player called Jackie Robinson.
He was the first player of color to have played in Major League Baseball in 1947. Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and led the team to their first-ever World Series Championship in 1955.
The movie 42 is a biographical sports film about his life and how he broke the colour barrier.
Roger Kahn’s Boys of Summer, heralded as one of the best baseball books ever written, traces the journey of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
After his playing days, Jackie Robinson contributed significantly to the civil rights movement and championed the causes of people of color.
In India, we might not have had a race divide but can you put yourself in your parents' shoes and realize the difficulties they faced while bringing you up? There were no cell phones, no food apps, no Uber or Ola, and they didn’t have the disposable incomes that we enjoy today. What about your grandparents? What about their lives? How did manage to raise large families in one-room houses with three-figure incomes?
It’s mind-boggling how tough it is to step into someone else’s shoes.
Jackie Robinson didn’t just step into the field and turn segregation over its head. He was booed, jeered, taunted. One of the terms in his contract was not to complain when he was spat on. Compare that to your worst work experiences.
The question and this applies to anyone that has overcome insurmountable obstacles, is — where did they get the inspiration from?
This is something I have constantly grappled with.
Jackie Robinson had no inspiration to speak of. He had a team that went against the grain and signed him but whose contract also allowed people to spit on his face. He had baseball players to look up to but no player of colour to seek inspiration from.
This applies to anyone who goes first, or treads a new path, or attempts to fight the status quo.
One of the best and most readymade forms of inspiration is being inspired by someone. Books, movies, podcasts, etc. play their role but nothing like a teacher, a boss, a friend, someone in flesh and blood to set an example that gets you off your backside and do something.
We have all had these people in our lives at certain points, those who push us, prod us, engage us and in the bargain, inspire us.
But we can’t always depend on finding or keeping these people.
We have also met the polar opposites of these kinds of people — those who weigh us down and suck the life out of us, leaving us depleted.
I was speaking to a close friend who told me that they didn’t have anyone to inspire them at work. I understood what they were saying because this is something even I have grappled with and been tied down by at certain points in my life and career. At some point, I realized it was a trap, an excuse, a mere form of hiding. By laying the blame on someone else’s doorstep, I was absolving myself of any responsibility.
I then realized there were people just like me who had started businesses, run teams, improved lives, learned skills that made them more valuable — all with no specific roadmap or so-called inspiration to fall back upon. This doesn’t mean the environments and the people around us aren’t important. You can’t thrive in toxic cultures or work for people who don’t respect. But if you complain about needing the inspiration to get out of those situations, you might be stuck there forever.
On seeing what people like Jackie Robinson fought against to even play a game, let alone become a legend, one realizes that inspiration is a story, an effort in its own right that compounds over time. It’s nothing something that arrives in the mail or on-demand.
Many times, I get stuck on how to finish a piece and I was facing the same problem with this one. Just then, I got a mail in my inbox with this excerpt from an interview of author Ursula K. Le Guin:
Interviewer: “Against whom were you measuring your work?”
Le Guin: “Charles Dickens. Jane Austen. And then, when I finally learned to read her, Virginia Woolf. Shoot for the top, always. You know you’ll never make it, but what’s the fun if you don’t shoot for the top?”
If you replace against whom with inspiration it still works.
It was just the inspiration I needed.
