You Only Hit What You Aim ForLast night for the first time I watched the 1992 film adaptation of David Mamet's stage play GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS. With an all-star cast tarring Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, and with an incendiary cameo by Alec Baldwin (no, I never thought I'd write that sentence either) the film is infamous for its brutal portrayal of a high-pressure office full of cut-throat real estate salesmen, and the hard-sell tactics they use to get folks to sign on "the line which is dotted." It's an incredibly well-done movie, very true to the play, but notorious for its liberal use of profanity and not something to watch with your ten-year-old. During the famous scene in which Alec Baldwin's character delivers a caustically scathing "motivational" speech to the other salesmen, I noticed several banners which were hung on the walls of the office. One in particular stood out among all the other clichéd sales slogans: "A man only hits what he aims for." I saw that banner and smiled. Truer words were never spoken! More things go unaccomplished in this life for lack of trying than for any lack of skill or ability. You can't win unless you play. Sure, you can't lose unless you play either. But the point at which FEAR of losing trumps DESIRE for winning, is the point at which you truly stop LIVING. If you want to see any real success in this life you must, must, must have GOALS. They must be WRITTEN down, and you must look at them EVERY DAY. You may change them over time, adding new ones and removing the old, but you must engage with them every single day. Without them you are a ship without a rudder, a navigator adrift without his compass, a blind man without his dog. Without a clear, concise statement of your priorities, any successes you achieve in life will be at best incidental and at worst accidental. Who are you? What do you want? Without a doubt these are the two great questions of philosophy. And yet it is the question of HOW to go about answering them that impacts us far more directly in our daily lives. Yoda said "Do or do not, there is no try." And in this sense he was right. We either succeed in an action or we fail. This idea of "trying" is just an excuse to preserve our fragile ego. The root idea which is often missed is that the value lies not only in the outcome of the action, but in the action ITSELF. "You only hit what you aim for" has another, less obvious meaning, specifically in the context of HOW to go about achieving what you want. It becomes easier to see if you remove the "you" from the sentence and move the emphasis from "aim" to "only". "ONLY hit what you aim for." This suggests that when you finally do decide on a goal, particularly an ambitious one, in order to achieve it efficiently (if at all) you must pursue it with SINGLE-MINDED intensity and purpose. No matter what other ancillary successes you may "hit" along the way, and no matter what speed-bumps you encounter, you keep your eye on the prize and persevere. Remember, sometimes it's not the hardships of a given road that keep us from reaching the end, but the very pleasant distractions we encounter along the way which lead us off the path. In the case of GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, it is revealed early in the film that one of the salesmen breaks into his own company’s office to steal certain confidential information, which he then sells for a tidy profit to a competitor across the street (I won’t ruin the movie by telling you who did it). All he was after was a quick buck, and he got what he aimed for. That man took what he thought was a shortcut, failed to keep his eye on the prize, and suffered the consequences. Don’t be that guy.
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