This has been hanging in my office for years. And yet I somehow missed the symbolism.
Last week I showed you a photo of The Coaching Habit in the remainder tray and braced for a little sympathy, but …
That’s not what I got.
My inbox filled up, and almost none of it was sympathy. You corrected me.
So many of you wrote back to tell me the same thing, in your own words:
What I saw as the remainder tray, you see as a used-book tray. (Kind of that “one person’s trash is another’s treasure” adage.)
You reassured me that the book wasn’t being thrown out. It got read, finished, and handed on for someone else to enjoy.
I especially found comfort in Jen’s note that she discovered an Edith Wharton book on the exact same rack at the Strand and spent the next decade collecting the rest of Edith’s novels.
You kept reaching for the same phrase, more or less … a new beginning.
So I’ve shifted my thinking. I’m not sad that someone decided there was no room for The Coaching Habit on their shelf …
I’m happy (dare I say, even ecstatic) that someone decided that it was worth passing along to someone else.
Instead of being thrown out, it’s now being resold and recycled — which isn’t a failure at all.
It’s the shape of success that becomes invisible once you’re standing inside it.
And then I turned around
There’s a picture on my office wall I’d stopped noticing. It’s the cover of The Coaching Habit, done up in that familiar Andy Warhol style. It’s an image printed so many times it stops being a picture and becomes a symbol.
The team at Box of Crayons gifted it to me for the company’s 15th anniversary. (The company turned 24 this past weekend!)
Looking at it this week, I realized something I was missing all along.
Warhol built a whole career taking something that already existed — like a soup can, or a face the world had seen a thousand times — and remaking it into something new.
And the style he made doing it became a classic in its own right, borrowed and remade all over again.
Which, I’m now realizing, is exactly what’s happening to The Coaching Habit.
One copy at the Strand, off to begin again with a new reader. And a brand-new hardcover edition and a brand-new audiobook starting their own journeys.
So I remind myself again: We are not our work
Nothing that gets handed on is dying.
A face on a million t-shirts or a book that’s been read by millions landing in the bargain bin.
These aren’t endings … they’re the same thing living another life, in a form the original never planned.
Last week I told you there’s a bass beat that keeps going under all the noise.
This week, it was you playing that beat, really loudly. So thank you.
