‘A Boy Named Jimmy’ Put In the Time

As a three year old she experienced a great trauma. Her skirt caught fire on an iron grate. Fearing it would happen again, her mother began dressing her in boys’ pants and nicknamed her Jimmy. Having no sisters to play with, she called herself ‘a boy named Jimmy’ until she was fourteen, playing with her brothers and the neighborhood boys. She spent Sunday afternoons on the porch, listening to family members tell stories about the Confederate War. Children were “seen not heard” at that time so she listened carefully and absorbed those stories. She wrote prolifically as a child and teen, making her stories into books and inventing characters of all shapes and sizes. Her one and only novel won her the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936. Gone With the Wind later won Margaret Mitchell the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1937. The novel was turned into a motion picture, and went on to win Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Adapted Screen play in the 1940 Academy Awards.

I greatly appreciate Margaret Mitchell’s candor about the process of writing. She notes that it was never easy for her, so she rewrote everything more than once or twice. We see the success of people, the accolades their work receives, never thinking about the work that went on behind the awards. All we see is the end result. The best in us demands that we focus, work hard and employ diligence to perfect our idea or output until it is ready for the world to experience it. Then we must wait and see how our work is received.

Let me encourage you to stick to it. Double down and do the work that is necessary to finish whatever it is you have started. Your ideas, your thoughts, the images in your head and maybe even your life’s work is worth putting in the time. Which means not doing everything else everyone in your life thinks you should be doing. Stick to your focus and do the work. Rework, rewrite it, redesign it, maybe even scratch and start again. Do not compromise your time and effort by settling for good enough. ‘A boy name Jimmy’ put in the time and changed our view of our nation’s civil war forever.