This won’t surprise anyone who knows me, but I’m not a natural at sports. I’m book smart. I am active. And I am strong.  But it seems to take me longer than average to form muscle memory from movement.

When I joined a local softball team as a kid with pigtails, I was stuck in the outfield, kicking at the dandelions, sad that the ball never landed in my mitt. Luckily, I had an older brother to tell me I was terrible and needed a lot of work. He was patient enough to toss a ball back and forth with me until I learned a crucial lesson: the ball goes where you aim it. It’s one of the most important things I know. 

Storytelling is like a game of catch. The best stories aren’t tossed haphazardly to nowhere or no one in particular. The best stories are aimed so that they can be caught. 

Aiming was a new approach for me. And it worked. But the next lesson was harder. 

I don’t know how many softballs my brother pinged into the blue prairie sky before I understood why people were always yelling, “Get under the ball.” But eventually, I noticed that every ball has a trajectory. If you pay attention to how it’s travelling through the air, you can estimate where it’s going to land. And if you run to that spot, it will land where you are. 

This was a hard lesson in the most literal sense. The truth of it struck me at the same time a leather softball dropped from the sky onto my upturned face. There were tears. I wanted to give up. I could feel the area around my left eye swelling. But my brother didn't want to stop the lesson there. The hard part was over, he insisted. All I needed to do was to put my mitt between the ball and my face, and I would catch it every time. 

The next time I was kicking dandelions in left field, where balls so rarely travel in little girls’ softball games, and I heard the ping of a pop fly, I knew what to do. I got under it. I put my mitt between my face and the incoming ball, and I even closed my other hand around it so it wouldn’t pop out. 

My coach’s jaw dropped. I got a big promotion to shortstop. It felt great to be a valuable part of my team. 

“Get under it” is one of the most important things I know. 

Everything worthwhile—Everything!—is achieved by firing up the twin engines of effort and risk. It’s how you make a friend. It’s how you make a baby laugh. It’s definitely how you tell a story. 

The hustling part is always more important than the part where you wish, however intently, for a desired outcome. Self-help authors make a lot out of positive visualization. Sure. But you have to try. Moreover, you have to put yourself in the way of danger, while still protecting your upturned face. Because stories are always a bit dangerous when there is the hard ring of truth in them. Stories need to be true. They don’t need to be real. So many of the greatest stories ever told are fiction. But they are true in the sense that they have velocity and substance. 

Telling the truth is much less safe than kicking dandelions, watching the clouds drift by, and wishing. But it's worthwhile. Where there’s velocity and substance, there is risk. But there, too, is reward.