“If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.” — Epictetus
Every week, there are multiple reports of Major League baseball players about to undergo “Tommy John surgery.”
Look:
But who the hell is Tommy John and why is this surgery named after him? More importantly, how does that help you make better decisions?
Tommy John is a former Major League baseball player.
As a left-handed pitcher, Tommy John holds the seventh highest ranking for total career victories, with a whopping 288 wins. What’s even more impressive, though, is that he’s had the third longest Major League baseball career of all time:
26 years.
That in a time when the average MLB career was just 5.6 years. His career started the year Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream speech”. The year he retired was the year the Berlin Wall fell in Germany.
The choices that led him there resulted from asking himself a single question in countless variations, hundreds of thousands of times:
Is this something I can even remotely control?
Tommy didn’t need a great chance. Not even a good chance. All he needed was a yes.
“Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.” ~Epictetus
As long as Tommy saw a positive cause-and-effect relationship between effort and the end result, the thing he controlled received 100% of his dedication, work and commitment…
…which brings us to 1974, the year he blew out his pitching arm – until then considered a total game over. Career. Terminated. But not for Tommy.
When he heard of an experimental procedure called “ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction,” by which a crucial ligament in his elbow would be replaced with a tendon from his other arm, he asked for the odds.
With the surgery? 1 in 100.
Without it? 0.
Tommy chose the surgery. And recovered. And won another 164 games over 13 years. More than half of his career.
What made him a great player, a great human being, was his ability to tell apart what’s impossible from what’s improbable.
And the surgery? Well, since Tommy was the first to ever take the risk, it would forever be known as Tommy John surgery.
What does all this mean? Simple: If you concentrate your potential on only the things you control, your potential increases.
Do as much as you can for the things you can do something about, and you’ll have done the best you can do.
Or, as Tommy put it:
“Always give a hundred percent, and you’ll never have to second-guess yourself.” — Tommy John
I learned about Tommy’s story in the chapter “Is It Up To You?” from Ryan Holiday’s fantastic book, The Obstacle Is The Way.
