so we got Ted fucking Williams beat, but still

Ted Williams was maybe the greatest hitter to ever play baseball. Considering he lost three prime years to World War II, years which are normally a player's best, he still had one of best careers in baseball history, and is naturally in the Hall of Fame.

Among his many achievements, he's the last person to have ever managed to hit .400 for an entire season – hitting .406 in 1941.

And I know it's a management guru cliché, but these days I can't help but think about that – the most successful hitter in baseball history was lucky to get a hit four out of every ten at-bats in his best year.

That's six out of every ten at-bats when Williams struck out, flied out, or grounded out. In other words, he mostly failed.

Hell, a really good player these days will be happy hitting .300, failing seven out of every ten trips to the plate. He'll make millions of dollars a year doing that.

And the reason that those facts weighs on me is because I want everything I do for a client to succeed. I don't just want the creative to be great; I want results. In direct marketing, results are really the only thing that matter. And it's especially so when your client is working with children who live in awful poverty, and your results mean funds to support that urgently needed work.

I posted recently about getting some perspective on almost a year's worth of work, but I haven't been able to put it to rest. Yes, I think our numbers are better than Ted's. In a category that's really taken a beating, we've achieved a lot, and I'd say we're batting about .700. But that .300 left over weighs on me. The stakes are high, and that .300 isn't about bad work getting done, or not enough effort, or failure per se. Our team is putting in more effort than I have any right to expect, and they're as personally vested in the work as I am; everyone is doing some of the best work they've ever done.

But something didn't work and it's our responsibility to think about that and learn from it, somehow.

Then again, Ted used to talk to himself during every at-bat, even during batting practice, just to keep pushing himself. Between each swing he'd mutter, "I'm Ted fucking Williams, and I'm the greatest hitter in baseball."

all the stuff on the wall

Something about seeing all your work for a year all at once that's upsetting, gratifying and humbling.

We recently got a dump of the results of our work for the past several months. Although the timing was unavoidable for a number of reasons, I was a little miffed that we hadn't been able to get access to results before this; it seemed to me to be a missed opportunity to learn and adapt as we've been going.

But one happy accident of this situation is that everything we're doing, for good or for ill, is really apparent. The lessons are obvious, if not the trends.

It shows you undeniably what your habits are, the kinds of things you do without really thinking about them because they're so obvious; the kinds of things you really should think about. You see work that did really well; you see work that didn't really engage people, in spite of the fact that it's really well done. And the reason you know it didn't engage people is that you put it up against the hard numbers.

That's the best and worst part of direct marketing – you don't get to hide from the results. You can try to find ways of spinning the numbers, but the numbers themselves don't change. Personally the hardest thing for me to do is to not be defensive and simply accept the results, and figure out what we can do better.

Because, after all, it's not art. It's a business that involves pictures and words.