What's Your Cutter?

The longer you go on in business and in life, the more you realize how  important it is to focus on what you do well, and to develop those skills - as opposed to chasing distractions in the name of ambition.

Mariano Rivera told me that when he was starting out with the Yankees, they’d give him scouting reports for teams he was going to face soon, and tell him he had to throw his curveball and change-up more, because certain players hit the fastball very well.

Mariano’s response was: “Whose fastball? Not mine.”

As you know, the rest is history. He stuck with his feared cutter, he made it the best it could be, and went on to become one of the greatest pitchers in the history of the game.

Over the last two years at Steiner, we’ve tried to roll out a lot of new products, but we haven’t been very good at them.

I’ve realized that we were trying to throw the change-up, and the curve, while the whole time, we’ve had an unstoppable fastball: producing really cool collectibles built around the biggest names in sports and marketing players to corporations around the country. That’s our cutter.

So we’re going to work at doing those things as well as we can. That’s how we made it to the Big Leagues in the first place.

What do you truly excel at?

Develop your natural talents, your natural strengths - as opposed to the skills you want to be good at.

Don’t let your ambition get ahead of your talent. Genius comes from the obvious. From the basics.

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