The Elusive High of the Big Win

A story about getting what you want

Photo by sandra lansue on Unsplash

Folks who have been reading this Substack for a while know that my pickleball partner and I set out to earn the 4.0 DUPR ranking (Dynamic Universal Pickleball Rating) in 2024. This came after a big win in a 3.5 level tournament and a tough loss at the 4.0 level. We wanted to be able to hold our own at the higher level.

We made a practice plan, signed up for lessons with a coach who we knew could help us achieve our goals, booked time on the ball machine, and joined a competitive co-ed league for 3.75+ players where every single point counts towards your position on the ladder. You play six games each session and you rise and fall with every point. It’s intense!

In the middle of the season, my partner got hurt. Or rather, she acknowledged that she already was hurt and decided to get it checked out. She found out she has a slipped disk in her back and needs to stop playing pickleball for six months or a year. We were both crushed!

I forged on alone in the league (which you play in as an individual, not a team — but still: I didn’t have my pal alongside me!) I fought my way to the top of the ladder, and as I kept winning, my DUPR rating went up. (They calculate it based on a percentage of points won versus points played in DUPR-specific events.) A few weeks ago, my rating jumped to 4.34.

I took a picture of the app and cheered and felt proud and happy. YAY ME! I did it! I challenged myself to do a thing and I did it.

The next night of the league, I went out to play with my shiny new rating in hand — and nothing had changed. Not one thing. The game is still the game.

I was still out there running and sweating and trying to hit the third shot drop and dealing with my glasses fogging up under the lights and laughing and swearing and getting bruised from people slamming the ball at my body. I was still out there trying to play well, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not, and having fun. I was still out there missing my friend and hoping she heals so that we can play together again.

The number meant nothing.

This is a story about pickleball but it’s also a story about running a business training and certifying book coaches.

2024 was a tough year for Author Accelerator, the business I started more than ten years ago. In the middle of the summer, things were looking pretty grim. If I did nothing — if I kept on doing the same things I was doing — the business would be in peril. I couldn’t bear that thought because I know without a doubt that the training we offer is valuable. I know without a doubt we are doing good work, leading this new industry, and helping empower book coaches and writers alike.

So just like with pickleball, I made some decisions to make things better. I invested in business training at a price point that was way higher than anything I’d ever done before. I learned some new skills. I made a commitment to raise our rates so that they would be more in alignment with our costs of running the business.

The whole endeavor depended on my ability to bring enough people into the business at the current price to give us time to adjust to selling at the new price, so I ran four webinars and hosted three open houses. I talked to hundreds of potential students — more than 35 of them in 1:1 meetings, which took a huge amount of time and energy and was also a huge amount of fun. I got to talk to people all over the world, from all different backgrounds, listening to what they love about writers and writing, listening to what they want from their careers and their lives.

I worked tirelessly, feeling as if every move I made counted just like those pickleball points.

I needed to bring in 20 people. I had a stretch goal of 30. The last day of this campaign was this past Tuesday, and when it was all said and done, we brought in almost 60 new students. It was a quarter-million-dollar + campaign. It was the kind of business win I have read about for years in entrepreneurial magazines and websites.

I took a look at the student roster and the bank account and cheered and felt proud and happy. YAY ME! I did it! I challenged myself to do a thing and I did it.

The next day, I got online to welcome the new students and to coach our certified coaches with my shiny new business win in hand — and nothing had changed. Not one thing. The work is still the work.

Big wins are exciting. Of course we want them. But they’re not the reason we do what we do.

They’re also (probably) not the reason your writers do what they do.

That line about big wins is a version of a quote by writer Madeline L’Engle that has lived in my mind for decades. She said, “Success is pleasant; of course you want it; but it isn’t what makes you write.”

It comes from her book, A Circle of Quiet. I found this write- up on this blog, which explains the context for the quote:

In A Circle of Quiet, [L’Engle] writes of her 40th birthday, a day on which she receives another in a series of rejections. Because it is the most recent of many and because it arrives on a turning-point birthday, L’Engle is devastated. She concludes that the rejection is a sign that she should abandon her writing and devote herself fully to domestic responsibilities. She covers her typewriter as a gesture of finality, but even as she weeps over her farewell to her writing life, a novel about failure begins to gestate.

She writes: “I uncovered the typewriter. In my journal I recorded this moment of decision, for that’s what it was. I had to write. I had no choice in the matter. It was not up to me to say I would stop, because I could not. It didn’t matter how small or inadequate my talent. If I never had another book published, and it was very clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing.”

I needed the reminder that a writer is defined by writing, not by publication. L’Engle reached this conclusion about writing in 1958. In 1960, she completed A Wrinkle in Time, a book with an awkward, irritable heroine and her five-year-old bother, a genius whose difference lead people to believe he is “slow.” A Wrinkle in Time was rejected twenty-six times before it finally found a publisher. L’Engle was told that the book was good but too difficult and too different to find an audience. She writes, “What matters is the book itself. If it is as good a book as you can write at this moment in time, that is what counts. Success is pleasant; of course you want it; but it isn’t what makes you write.”

As I sit here at the end of a week with a very big win, I am reminded about why I do what I do — and the deep pleasure that comes from helping people bring their books and businesses to life.

---