Ted Williams’ amazing clarity

I just finished Leigh Montville's Ted Williams: The Biography of An American Hero.

In short: The best baseball biography I’ve ever read. I’m not going to do a full rehash-review. The book is a year old, and there was plenty of press on it last year.

But I do want to talk about Just One Thing from the book.

Remember in one of the City Slickers movies when Jack Palance tells Billy Crystal that the key to happiness is Just One Thing? The problem in life is finding that Just One Thing. Figuring out where to put our focus to give our lives richness and purpose.

Ted Williams had no such trouble.

And it wasn’t that Williams lived to play baseball. It was that he lived to hit a baseball. No matter what went on around him—a troubled home in his youth, an ongoing merry-go-round of women later in life, being drafted into two wars, battling with Boston sportswriters—Williams knew that the center of his existence on earth was to hit a baseball.

Man, how wonderful to have such clarity in life!

Think about it. Such a simple act. Bat on ball. And what did Williams’s laser-focus on that simple act do for him? Made him wealthy (for awhile, anyway). Made him famous. Secured his place in the history of not just baseball, but in the greatest country on earth.

As Tom Peters would say: “Wow!”

This is another example why baseball is great—it can teach us so much. Ted Williams: Bat on ball. That’s it. All that came from it was wealth, fame, power and immortality.

Amazing what focus can do. Thanks for the lesson, Ted! (And thanks baseball!)