The .300 Standard

The crack of the bat, the rhythm of innings, the slow unfolding of a game that refuses to be rushed. Opening Day always feels like a reset, not just for teams but for anyone paying attention. The air shifts, the sun lingers a little longer, and the grass begins to reclaim its color. There is something grounding about it, something that signals movement, growth, and a return to possibility.

I have always loved baseball for that reason. As a lifelong Cubs fan, I know something about patience, persistence, and the belief that the work eventually pays off. The game teaches you things if you let it.

So there I was, tuned into the second game of the season, when a comment from the broadcast stopped me. The announcer mentioned a player's batting average, sitting around .300, and then said something that I could not shake: that player fails seven out of every ten times he steps to the plate. Said plainly, almost as an afterthought. And yet it landed like something worth sitting with.

Because in baseball, a .300 hitter is elite. That is the standard. That is what separates good from exceptional. And the person hitting that mark is failing more than twice as often as he succeeds.

If you slow down long enough to let that settle, it quietly challenges everything we tend to believe about success.

Seven times out of ten, that same elite player walks back to the dugout without a result. He strikes out, grounds out, flies out. And still, we celebrate him. Not because we ignore the failures, but because we understand the difficulty of the task, the consistency required, and the truth that success at that level is not defined by perfection. It is defined by persistence over time.

That perspective rarely transfers to how we view leadership, or how we view ourselves.

I was reminded of that at NCMLE, the North Carolina Middle Level Education conference where I have had the privilege of speaking for the past three years. In conversation after conversation, the same theme surfaced: the work people do not talk about. The struggles that never make it to the stage. Not because they do not exist, but because there is little incentive to share them. Visibility tends to follow perceived success, so the full story stays incomplete. What we see are polished presentations, growing organizations, and visible impact. What we do not see are the missed opportunities, the quiet doubts, and the decisions that did not land the way they were intended.

But that is only one side of it.

The more immediate issue is how quickly we judge, ourselves and each other. A hitter swings at a bad pitch and suddenly the narrative shifts. Frustration rises, criticism follows, and in that moment no one is thinking about the .300. No one is thinking about the body of work. The focus narrows to a single misstep, as if that one moment defines the entirety of the player. We do the same thing in leadership. One decision misses the mark, one conversation does not land, one moment of poor judgment surfaces, and suddenly context disappears, grace evaporates, and the evaluation becomes absolute.

It ignores the reality that sustained success is rarely clean.

Hitting .300 requires discipline, preparation, the willingness to adjust, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to move on quickly from failure. The expectation is not that you will avoid mistakes. It is that you will continue to show up in spite of them. That is where the real lesson lives.

As leaders, we have to learn to zoom out. If you are measuring yourself only by your most recent misstep, you are distorting the full picture. Your body of work tells a different story. You are in your position for a reason. You have produced results, created impact, and navigated challenges that most people around you never see. One moment does not erase that.

At the same time, success has a way of creating selective memory. It becomes easy to highlight the wins and quietly distance yourself from the process that made them possible, the long nights, the uncertainty, the mistakes that forced growth. When those parts get edited out, success starts to look effortless, even though it never was. And that is where leaders can quietly lose their connection to the people they serve. Because the people around you are still in their seven out of ten. They are navigating the failures, the adjustments, the learning curves. If all they ever see is your three, without any understanding of your seven, the gap feels impossible to close.

So the responsibility runs in both directions. Give yourself permission to be human in the process, because mistakes are not evidence of incompetence. They are part of the work. And stay grounded enough to remember where you have been, because success is not something that replaces struggle. It is built on top of it.

Baseball has a way of surfacing truths that are easy to forget. It is a game of repetition, resilience, and perspective, one that teaches you, season after season, that success and failure are not opposites. They coexist. They inform each other. Babe Ruth understood that as well as anyone ever has. He once said, "Every strike brings me closer to the next home run."

That is not just a statement about baseball. It is a statement about the work.