In Which A Different Sports Manga Speaks To Me About Effort
From the writer that bought such seminal pieces as How Haikyu!! is Helping Me Cope and The View from the Top: ‘Haikyu’ and Reaching My Peak, comes yet another essay about a sports manga being the catalyst for self-reflection.
This one is super new though. Let me introduce you to Harukaze Mound.
This is a relatively recent offering from Shonen Jump, having debuted back in June. Given that I collect sports media unrepentantly, this quickly got added to the queue of stories that I read on Sunday mornings. It is baseball manga. It is as archetypal as sports manga gets, where our protagonist, Nagiharu, is a left handed pitcher who is overshadowed by his younger prodigy more conventional pitcher Aokaze. That is until a chance encounter with a stranger sends Nagiharu down a new road and becoming the high school pitcher in Japan.
You don’t need to worry too much about the details. It’s a fun read. Everything I’m going to talk about is gonna be in this spread.
The line in question: “The hardest thing isn’t when you need to work hard. It’s when you’re not sure what kind of hard work if necessary.”
Since starting therapy back in March, I have discovered that one of my core values is competency. I like being good at things. I like working with people who are good at what they do. I am naturally drawn to people who good at what they do. But, as is often the case, there are plateaus. There are times when “better” is an ill-defined pipe dream.
For example: at work, I am currently continuing a year long conversation with my boss about vertical progression in my role as a technical writer. I have ascended through the ranks as fast as I possibly could have (to the point where my boss has openly told me that my salary does not fully match my position, which is a bit flattering, but also, why would you tell me that?). And I don’t say this to brag, but to imprint that I take my work seriously. That I have been intentional in my work. That I have been deliberate and that my efforts have been seen.
However, in my aspirations to keep being a technical writer, I am at an impasse. I have no want to give up making content in favor of management or information architecture, both which would see me in an endless dirge of meetings. However, vertical progression requires something “innovative”, which leads to this fascinating see-saw. Any thing that I do to innovate will naturally come at the expense of the work that I like. However, despite being markedly good at my job, it is still not enough to get promoted because it’s not at the higher level.
And given that I still firmly hold the belief that AI generated docs is the worst possible thing for our users despite internal management and users themselves wanting it, there is not a lot of room for “innovation.” And ultimately, I don’t want to innovate. I want to be given stuff to write. I want to make good guides and revive Clippy (something that definitely started out as a joke, but is now seemingly a reasonable course of action over LLMs).
As my company’s fiscal year draws to a close, I am being asked to develop goals for 2026, and the question is what do I need to invest it?
Again, I ask what does better look like?
For example: In a shocking turn of events, I find myself thinking about my time with Destiny 2. I still have absolutely no interest to return to the franchise, but it’s absence has left a sizable void in my life in the form of daily activities and also the week long vacation I would have taken around this time of year to play the new DLC.
Over the course of the decade, I got really good at the game. I got really knowledgeable about the game. I was objectively good at the game. A 1%er. Or at the very least, a 5%er. I had done everything and then some.
The reason I left the game was three fold. Firstly was simply the repetition of playing the same game for a decade finally caught up to me. Secondly was the overhauling of the core systems of the game was fundamentally changing the game in a way I wasn’t really excited about it. And thirdly, and the one I didn’t really parse until now was that the only way to get better to reach the next echelon in all of this would require even more gargantuan time investment than the already several thousands hours I had already invested only to become marginally better, and in its place, I could do… literally anything else.
And mind you, literally anything else has been great. It’s been more writing, it’s been the new escape room, it’s been going back to my organizer’s roots. But ultimately, these are short term projects and there is a gap that was 2-3 hours of my day over many years that I am filling up with patchwork and there is nothing shaped quite like Destiny, nor do I necessarily want that.
But for the longest time, getting better at Destiny was something that helped me get better. But now, what does better look like?
For one final example: I know for a fact that I am kind of at a plateau with my writing. I know I can produce anything and everything. I know I can be consistent. I know I can get myself out there.
But, maybe now that I have a taste of collective recognition, I am in search of solo recognition. Maybe now, I need to finish that music. Maybe now, I need to go back to poetry. Maybe now, I am beginning to reckon that I need more bylines and that I need to aggressively pursue those bylines and not just leave them out to fanciful whims. MMaybe now, I need to invest in social media and getting seen.
God, it always comes back to perception.
Better at writing (non-technical) looks like a lot of things. And (don’t worry, I’m wrapping up this nicely) I know I am capable of the hard work, but I am not entirely sure what kind of hard work I actually need to do.
But I also know I’m stubborn enough that I will figure it out.