True Understanding
The other day, my son and I got some measuring tape and chalk. We wanted to understand something.
Our family fell in love with baseball this year. Specifically, with the Toronto Blue Jays.
My son got a baseball glove for Christmas last year, and now on every nice (or nice-ish) day, we go outside for a catch.
Until recently, we had been playing catch across the width of our street. Sidewalk to sidewalk. Occasionally, we’d go the length of the street and throw some longer balls to each other.
The other day, we decided to see what the Major League players do. So we got some measuring tape and chalk, and decided to mark out 60 feet and six inches on the street. The exact distance from the pitching mound to home plate.
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Stephen Ango is the CEO of a software company called Obsidian.
He also likes to bake cookies.
During his interview on The Other Stuff (a Toronto-based podcast), one of the show’s team members—Alex—attempts to make Stephen’s Deluxe Chocolate Chip Cookie, using Stephen’s own recipe.
Stephen’s recipe has 14 ingredients, including one ice cube.
During the show, Alex says to Stephen, “I definitely learned a lot about you while making it. I did a lot of research on you leading up to this, and I think if I just made the cookie I would have got the same amount of information.”
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Since 2015, John Mayer (musician, soundtrack to my late high school and early university years) joined the Grateful Dead’s offshoot band, Dead & Company.
When talking to Rick Rubin about how he studies the Grateful Dead’s former lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, John says this:
“If you listen to a guitar player playing long enough, you’ll understand them. Especially as a guitar player. You can sort of reverse engineer who someone must be, based on hundreds of thousands of choices. If you take all those choices that he’s making, a lot of times he’s making the sensitive choice. Not the pelvic, not the sort of histrionic, incendiary, he’s making the sensitive choice. That’s changed my guitar playing.”
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The first thing you realize after measuring 60 feet and six inches is that the distance between the pitching mound and home plate is far.
Like, really far.
After a few (mostly failed) throws to my son from this distance, I instantly gained an entirely new appreciation for the game that I’ve fallen deeply in love with.
Henry “Hank” Aaron (Baseball Hall of Fame, 2nd most home runs of all time at the time of this writing), has this line in his autobiography:
“All I had to go on was the scouting report, but a scouting report doesn’t compare to a career of face-to-face confrontations. That’s the only way to really get to know a pitcher.”
Many times, we think we understand things because we’ve read a scouting report.
True understanding comes from face-to-face confrontations.
p.s. If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy this one from a few years ago, “The Map is not the Territory.”
