Charlie Hustle

During a spring training game between the New York Yankees and the Cincinnati Reds, Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford threw enough bad pitches to send batter Pete Rose to first base. Instead of ambling over to first, Rose ran, and Ford mocked Rose, nicknaming him "Charlie Hustle." As a Wikipedia contributor puts it, "Despite (or perhaps because of) the manner in which Ford intended it, Rose adopted that nickname as a badge of honor."

I have never understood why trying makes a person seem uncool and ridiculous to observers. Everyone's been to a club where the dance music is booming and the lighted squares of the dance floor are changing colors and the walls are pulsing and no one is dancing because no one wants to be the first fool on the floor. I've worked many jobs where, if you wanted to get along with everybody, you had to move slowly and accomplish little. And we all know the ostracism the kid who studies for the test gets for "throwing off the curve."

Conservation of energy comes naturally to humans. Life is constant negotiation and the other guy will take you for ride if you don't watch yourself.  And I understand that pressure from above can be ridiculous. The reason my co-workers dragged butt was that some of the people we worked for would have paid us a dollar an hour and worked us sixty hours a week if they'd been allowed.

But there's covering your behind and then there's the repackaging of putting in little or no effort as being hip and knowing how to work things. It doesn't help that in the digital age, there are four people actually doing something and four billion people tweeting about it.

Well, I think trying is good. In fact, I think trying your absolute best is really good. Be an artisan, not a dabbler. If your job is awful, figure out how you got stuck doing something below your skill level.

And if there's no way around it. . .  I saw a man about seventy years old in a pizza place near a collage campus, who was putting a pizza into a brick oven with a wooden paddle. He wore impeccable swhite pants and a white shirt and a clean blue denim apron. He slid the pizza into the oven and then replaced the paddle on its hook, with a quiet graceful effort. I remember thinking, "How many pizzas has this guy baked over the years?  At the maximum, fifty a day, so three hundred a week (he looked like a six day a week kind of guy), and therefore fifteen thousand or so a year, times fifty years. One and a half million pizzas in his lifetime, and he was doing this particular pizza as if he was taking a test for his pizza certification. He took pride in what he did, and he had no idea that I was watching him. He did it for himself.

It's been true forever that some people think up one idea, or make one basket at the buzzer, or smile during one scene in a movie, and their fortune is made. The likelihood of that happening to the rest of us would fit in a gnat's navel with room left over. The rest of us are going to have to make an effort.