Persist, Adapt, Repeat

My name is Dave O'Gorman and I am trying to finish a novel. And the problem with that idea is that I am not particularly smart. For more than two decades of on-again / off-again writing and on-again / off-again adulthood I've put up a serviceable front as someone with something going on above the neck, but the truth of the matter is that I've been largely faking it the whole time. Some would tell you otherwise, but I'm actually not a terrifically bright guy.

This is not false modesty. I am not smart enough to have taken the undergraduate math classes I would have needed to excel in a graduate-level economics program, and I'm not smart enough to have realized that shortfall before trying a second time. I'm not smart enough to see a half-full glass when the totality of the world's progress all seems pointed in such an unhealthful direction, and I'm not smart enough to avoid alienating people by crabbing about it on Facebook. I'm not smart enough to learn my lesson about trying on ideas with friends who'd rather not be monopolized by the uncooked pasta salads oozing from my brain, and I'm not smart enough not to brood when they get tired enough of listening to me, to call me on my bullshit.

What I just may be smart enough to do, is persist.

True, this persistence has often manifested as a dogged, unsavory, almost Nixonian dedication to silencing some critic or doubter or imagined slight -- but this doesn't change the fact that in the half-dozen venues I've decided are important to me, I've proven almost without exception that I can calm the screeching sleet-storm inside my head sufficiently to leg out my agenda. The only big thing I've really ever quit on is my Ph.D. in economics, and that was after I'd passed the written preliminaries. So, okay, no: I can't keep my gigantic mouth shut; I can't wake up tomorrow and not be mostly self-focused and vain and cranky. But if I've proven anything it's that I can grit my teeth and finish something if I want it bad enough. (Badly is an adverb.) It's a meager form of emotional intelligence -- hell maybe it's the most meager form of emotional intelligence -- but it is something I can do. And until very recently it would have been enough to get me the rest of what I want. I can persist. It's not nothing. It's just not everything, either.


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