The Wrong Question
Reps Remove Doubt.
I named these writing sessions after a clip I heard on the Rich Roll podcast. Chris Paul was being interviewed and someone asked him about change, about sustaining it, about how you keep going when you can’t see the result yet.
He said: just keep stacking days.
Then he talked about his son. Small kid, same build CP3 had at that age. They’d been doing training sessions together and his son was frustrated because the work hadn’t shown up in his game yet. Paul wasn’t panicking. He just kept saying the same thing. Stack days. I promise you, if you keep stacking days, you will see the change.
Then he landed this: reps remove doubt.
I wrote that down immediately. Not because it was new information, but because someone had finally said it in the right order.
I didn’t start playing baseball until I was eight years old. That’s late. The division one players I eventually played with had been in tee ball since they were five. Three years of reps I didn’t have.
The only reason I even started was geography. We lived across the street from someone on the board of our local little league. That’s it. That’s the whole story. If they had been on the board of the local AYSO soccer league instead, I’d be writing this as a former soccer player. Everything happens for a reason, but sometimes the reason is just who your neighbor happens to be.
My dad built us a batting cage in the backyard. Not a real one. Canopy poles and green garden mesh, rigged together into something that held just enough shape to get tee work in. My sister and I would be out there for hours. It wasn’t sophisticated. It was just available, and we used it.
I didn’t really hit my peak until sophomore year of high school, then again as a senior. Named to the Press Telegram’s 2018 Baseball Dream Team. One of the best seniors in Orange County. But that didn’t come from being naturally gifted or starting early. It came from a decade of closing the gap on players who had years on me before I ever picked up a bat.
I never sat down and asked myself if baseball was my passion. I just played. The feeling got built somewhere inside all of it, across years of reps, until one day I couldn’t imagine not playing.
Nobody warns you that it happens in that order.
Writing was the same, just later. And the beginning of it looked nothing like passion. It looked like obligation. Like a founder who needed to stay consistent and made a commitment he wasn’t sure he believed in yet. It looked like Tuesday mornings where I had nothing and wrote anyway because the discipline existed before the desire did.
Somewhere in that stretch something shifted. I don’t know the exact morning. I just know there was a point, maybe eight or nine essays in, where I sat down and it wasn’t because I had to anymore. Something needed to come out and the page was the only place it fit. That’s the conversion. Not the spark at the beginning. The conversion that happens in the middle, after enough reps have accumulated that the doubt starts losing its grip.
Reps remove doubt. Indeed.
Everyone who has ever given career advice has told some version of the same story. Find your passion. Turn it into work. You’ll never work a day in your life.
The story assumes the feeling comes first. That somewhere inside you there’s a calling waiting to be discovered, and if you can just locate it, the work becomes obvious.
I don’t think that’s how it works. I think that’s the sequence in reverse.
It wasn’t a passion turned into work. It was work done extremely passionately.
The word order matters more than it looks like it does. Passion is not the input. It’s the output. You don’t bring it to the work. You build it inside the work, rep by rep, Tuesday by Tuesday, until one day you’d do it for free and you’re slightly embarrassed by how long it took to notice.
CP3’s son doesn’t need to love training right now. He just needs to stack days until the love has enough material to work with. That’s what his father was telling him. Not find what you love and go do it. Just stack the days. The rest follows.
Last week I went out to a field and hit off a tee for the first time in five years. Victus bat, Wilson glove, cleats I almost left in the closet forever. No audience, no reason, just the tee and the grass and whatever was left in the swing.
It was still there.
That’s what these sessions are. Stacked days. Some of them come easy. Most of them don’t. All of them count the same.