Sometimes you have to trade in your letters ~ March 21, 2002

David Heiller

Cindy and I were playing Scrabble on March 16. She was beating me (as usual) by a score of 203 to 114. I took my turn and got up to 138.

Then Cindy skipped a turn and traded in her letters for new ones.

I made another decent play and got up to 166.

So now the score was 166 to 203. Look out, Cindy!

But wait.

Cindy played the word “cleansed.”
It was a Scrabble, which is worth 50 extra points. Plus it started on a triple word and ended on a triple word, which means you multiply the value of the word by nine. So she added 168 points to her score and that, as they say, was all she wrote. She ended up beating me by 235 points. Her margin of victory was more than my total score!

There is a Scrabble lesson here: Sometimes you have to cash in your letters and miss a turn in order to improve your chances of success. It’s hard to do, because you give your opponent a chance to catch up. But it often leads to better things, which Cindy illustrated rather brilliantly.

It applies to other things as well.

I am sure that David was coming up with a good play here.

Robert Pirsing had a variation on this lesson in his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. When he was working on his motorcycle and not making any progress, he would get frustrated and try to force things. Often he would break something or make it worse. He learned to walk away and do something else when he hit a roadblock. He found that when he came back, he could fix the problem. He saw it differently, and he had a different attitude. I’ve taken that advice to heart many times and find it is true also.

When all else fails, get out your banjo.

It’s true in my profession. Every beginning journalism student or writer of any kind is told, or soon learns on his own, that the best, thing you can do after you write something, letting it sit for a while, then go back and read it with a fresh mind. You’ll often see ways it can be improved.

For my hobby of playing music, it holds true also. I heard a banjo player at a workshop once tell the students that there are times when he doesn’t play the banjo, because it just doesn’t, feel right, it doesn’t go well, it doesn’t work. I have learned to recognize those times and do something else. It was good to hear a professional say that, because I find that I sometimes get frustrated with my playing, and I’ve learned to put my instrument down and do something else at times like that, rather than force it.

Don’t force the issue, unless you have to.

That’s my point. As Cindy showed me last week, a little patience can pay big dividends. I bet it holds true in your profession. Maybe that’s why God invented coffee-breaks.