“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”  – Wayne Gretzky (MICHAEL SCOTT 😄)

Great quote, of course, but even more intriguing and inspiring to me is the original context in which Gretzky said it.

The passage below is from an article published in the New York Post a couple years ago (Link HERE):

The first documentation of this quote came in 1983 from Gretzky speaking to Bob McKenzie, then the editor of The Hockey News and now a commentator for TSN in Canada. Gretzky attempted the most shots in the league pretty much every season during this era, and MacKenzie asked him about it.

“You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take,” Gretzky answered. “Even though there is only a 1-5 percent probably [sic] of scoring.”

Sad truth: It’s not uncommon for people to be judged negatively for having lots of failures sprinkled throughout the timeline of their careers. I initially read Gretzky’s stated sucess rate as “one in five,” or 20%, which sounded terrible enough. But no, he actually said a “1-5 percent” probability of scoring. Way worse! And yet, if you take enough shots, as Gretzky said, that 1-5% success rate can add up to a large number of goals (or other non-hockey achievements) overall.

This reminds me of another sports-related truth: As a batter, Babe Ruth held the career record for strikeouts (1,330) for many years until he was overtaken by Mickey Mantle (1,710) in 1964. Babe Ruth also held the home run record (714) for almost four decades after his 1935 retirement, finally ending when Hank Aaron hit his 715th homer in 1974.

So for almost 30 years, baseball’s weakest hitter by one measure was also its most powerful by another! Kind of crazy . . . and a comforting thought for those times when failures seem to be racking up left and right.

Portrait of Babe Ruth, Charles M. Conlon, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons