I’m not much of an inspirational quote guy, because inspiration usually comes in bursts and then goes away for days, months or even years and ends up being useless. I’ve had thousands of inspirational thoughts come to my head, only to abandon me. My phone is filled with thousands of ideas and my blog has 583 drafts. Inspiration is a ghost that I’ve chased a thousand times and only caught 12 times.

Now, to go completely contrary of the last paragraph, there is an inspirational quote from Jacob Riis, that the Spurs use as an organization to help them remember to grind every day, until they win championships. It the bedrock of their franchise, which is funny, because the mantra is, “Pounding the rock“, which they take from this quote, “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times with as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

And now I’m contradicting the inspirational quote thing. See how I’m twisting you all around like a rollercoaster?

The lesson from pounding the rock? It is NOT to pound The Rock, because he would pound you back in a way that would have you seeing stars and possibly six feet under the ground. It’s more to pound the rock, meaning, grind every day. Yes, Steve Jobs was inspired to create the first Macintosh, but he needed Steve Wozniak to grind out how the computer would work. They were both toiling away at Atari at the time, making ironically, a game called Breakout, when they decided to breakout of Atari and go out on their own.

Time travel wasn’t invented overnight either. Sure, Doc Brown came up with the idea for time travel in 1955, when he slipped on his toilet while hanging a clock and hit his head on a sink and in his stupor saw the flux capacitor, but he didn’t invent time travel until 1985, which was 30 years later. He had to “pound the rock” for 30 years before time travel was invented.

As a father, I’ve been pounding the rock for 19 years now. I would argue, in this case, that the kids did most of the pounding though. I’ve been taking a beating from them from the moment they were born. They give me pounding headache almost every day. Little did I know that the youngest one, who was only 6 pounds (has given me way more pounds than that) when he was born, and not much bigger two months later, would eventually be as tall as me and much stronger. Not that I’m a behomoth or anything, but he is. He pounds his pop almost every day when he tries to wrestle me.

I just realized at this very moment that pounding the rock gives me an excuse to tell my wife why I’m stuck in so many routines. She always makes fun of me for them, and thinks it makes they make me predictable and boring. Now I can just say, “Honey, I’m just pounding the rock. It will lead to greatness, but you have to be patient.” (Little does she know that my plan for pounding the rock to get successful is selling this blog to Elon Musk for a billion dollars.)

It also gives me an excuse to play more video games. Some people think that video games are a waste of time and money. I disagree. They are saving you. A whole generation of video games players are ready for the alien invasion, the zombie apocalypse, World Wars, and the end of the world, so we’re good.

If that isn’t enough, there are real world benefits. Go ahead and scoff, but many writers, scholars, scientists and me, have studied video game and their effect on the brain and they have come up many positive things. One of those things is that it can help stave off dementia, which is something that I worry about, because it runs in my family. I know this is a terrible thing, and I don’t mean to make light, but my mother and her mother had dementia, and neither of them played video games. I’m just saying.

There are other really positive things about video games too. I play video games with a few buddies on the weekend’s, and I’ve only met them twice in real life. I consider them some of my all-time best friends, which isn’t hard because I’ve barely had any friends in my life. My sister calls them my made-up friends, but one of them was her husband, so that means she made up her husband.

People play video games for a couple of reasons. Some do it because they are competitive and want to win at all costs. They love short games, they complete them as fast as they can, and then they dip to another game. Then there are gamers like me. I play a game for a while. I grind away at missions, grind away at leveling up, I grind away at growing my character, and I grind away to achieve achievements. When there is a goal to get 100,000,000 kills in a game, that is one that I will achieve. I may not be able to pull of stunts like I used to, but I pound the rock on those long-term achievements. That means there is a video game 401K for my characters, because I invested so much in them. If there is one achievement that I will earn in video games and in life, it will be longevity.

When I started this blog 10 years ago, I was just posting 100-word complaints I had about dumb things like work, traffic, and socks. Now, I’m posting 1,000-word essays on the cultural change of pounding rocks. Talk about leveling up. All because I kept pounding the rock, by pounding that keyboard. And you pounded away that reading, so here are your head pounding Bitter Friday Giftures…

I’m not an inspirational quote guy…

When I talk about Pounding the Rock…

And not…

And definitely don’t recommend pounding the Rock…

More like Steve Jobs getting inspired to create something…

Or like Doc Brown falling on the toilet…

But then taking 30 years of pounding that rock…

When it comes to parenting…

And mostly happens to your head…

Luckily video games were invented…

At work, the harder you grind on your work…

And eventually you will be able to…

ARRRGGGHHHHHHHHH

Bitter Pounding the Rock Ben

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