Never Go Down Looking
My daughter plays travel softball, which means our family spends a lot of time at ball fields across Indiana. It’s a love-hate thing for me. I love watching her play, watching her get better, and helping her translate what happens on the field into lessons that matter beyond it. I could do without the hours in the car, the downtime between games, and the weekends spent outside in blistering heat, cold and rain.
Every time she ages up, there’s a new adjustment. The pitching gets faster. Pitchers get stronger. New pitches enter the mix. It can be intimidating. My husband has one piece of advice he comes back to again and again: Never go down looking. You might get behind in the count. You might be facing a pitcher who looks better than anyone you’ve seen before. But you don’t give up the at-bat. Reset. Step back in. Take the swing.
I thought about that recently while talking with a past Mapt client who has come back to us for help with the next chapter of her organization. She leads a small nonprofit, and when we first met, she was frustrated by how small their world had become. She could see a much bigger future, but they didn’t have a lot of resources to invest in figuring out how to get there.
I liked them. I liked her. I believed in what they were trying to do. So we found a way to help. We did the strategic planning work for next to nothing because sometimes the cause and the people behind it are worth it. My team would probably tell you I’d give away all of our services if they let me. They aren’t entirely wrong. That’s what Mapt has always been about for me: doing good work that matters.
Together, we built an ambitious but practical plan for where the organization could go. Since then, they’ve been doing the hard part: putting in the work to make it real.
A few months ago, the executive director called me about a major grant opportunity in her region. On paper, it looked like a long shot. Her organization was small. The opportunity seemed designed for organizations that were bigger, more established and better funded. Only a handful of applicants would receive awards, and putting together a competitive proposal would take real time and effort. She wanted to go for it, but she had the question most of us have when the odds don’t look particularly good: Is it even worth taking the swing?
She did. And she didn’t get the grant.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Her proposal was compelling enough that the funder took notice and found another, smaller pool of funding to support her organization. That interest then helped spur another funder in the region to step forward with an even larger investment. She didn’t hit the home run she stepped up to the plate looking for. But she moved runners. And sometimes that’s how progress actually happens.
We spend a lot of time calculating whether something is worth pursuing. Whether we’re qualified enough. Big enough. Ready enough. Whether the odds justify the effort. Those are reasonable questions, and sometimes the answer really is no. But sometimes we focus so much on the likelihood of the perfect outcome that we discount everything else that could come from taking the swing: a new relationship, someone noticing your work, an unexpected opportunity, or simply learning something that makes the next attempt stronger.
When you swing, you might miss. And when you connect, it might not be a home run. But it could be the base hit that changes the direction of the game for you and the people counting on you.
You can’t know exactly what will happen when you swing. You do know what happens when you don’t.
Take the swing. Learn from what happens. And never go down looking.