Seth is learning to juggle better.
The secret, as I wrote about in The Practice is the throwing, not the catching. If you get the throws right, the catches are easy.
The way to focus on the throws is simple but culturally difficult: Errant throws don’t earn a lunge.
Let them drop.
Simply stand there and watch them drop.
Realize that the problem isn’t that you didn’t lunge. The problem was that your throws were off.
And at work? Ah, that’s a little harder.
There are lots of rewards for heroic saves at work. But heroic saves undermine the desire to build better systems.
I’ve done lots of lunging in my time in Proposal Land. Working crazy hours. Rewriting crappy inputs. Digging out inconsistencies driven by a lack of planning. I’m far from the only one.
Should I have just stood there and let a “badly thrown” proposal hit the floor? Not likely.
Should you? Not likely.
But you can make sure you and everyone else understands what just happened, and you can commit to doing the work to preventing it from happening again. That’s why I wrote The Book: to document what I’d learned about how to throw better. To help others learn how to stop having to lunge to save a proposal.
If you get the throws right, the catches are easy.
The corollary? If the catches *aren’t* easy, you know you’re not throwing right.