Yeah, gumption. Do you still have it? And just what the hell is it, really?
Merriam-Webster thinks it is “Enterprise, initiative.”
The internet tells us it’s courage, spunk, guts; common sense, shrewdness; drive, initiative.
The one I like is “The kind of courage or get-up-and-go that makes undertaking difficult things possible.” At least that’s what I’ve always thought it meant. You know, simply the energy and will to do a task.
So, do you have it? I don’t. Well, I guess I still do, in tiny increments. These days I lie in the weeds and wait for it, look for it, hoping it will come, hell, needing it to come, to grab me, to motivate me, to move me.
Sometimes gumption of any sort sneaks by me, except for the very rare occasions when I’m waiting for it and snatch it. I simply don’t do what I’d intended, but rather just sit here, gumptionless. It’s not a great feeling, it’s kind of a tired, empty feeling and I don’t like it. I have to admit, however, that being gumptionless is partly mental, at least for me, for if there’s something fun I want to do, but don’t seem to have the energy for it, I magically find that energy and go do the fun thing. Weird, eh?
And even better, when my Betty Ann needs me to do a thing, gumption suddenly bounds across the room, enters my body, and before I realize what just happened, I’m half way done with the task. but maybe that one isn’t too hard to figure out…
Now, I can force myself to do a task without any gumption, but that usually brings with it some form of “attitude,” usually sour to bad. And that’s not a good thing. Usually any kind of bad attitude while doing a job will make the job seem harder, with more things tending to go wrong, increasing the bad attitude. I’ve found that if I get out of my chair and think, “Oh, what the hell, Hulse… just go do it!” The task goes better and usually quicker than my dread of it had imagined.
I have refined a process I like to call “mini-gumptions.” If my task is physical at all, and takes more than 5 minutes, I do part of it, then plop down in my chair, catch my breath and wait for the next mini-gumption to stroll by. And it works! Takes a little longer, sure, but the task gets completed, as any size of gumption, once, activated, almost always demands completion.
I guess one of the descriptions of a great job is the one where we don’t need any gumption to get up each morning and do it – we usually can’t wait to go do it! And there’s that saying I understand but don’t like, “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life!” That is pure bullshit. I get the intent, of course, but to my mind, the job or the work hasn’t been invented or experienced that doesn’t, at one point or other, bring with it the requisite difficulties and challenges that makes one dread the next step… which usually calls for what else? A little bit of gumption!
As much as I loved my job writing jingles and scores for corporate films in a beautiful recording studio with great audio engineers and staff, (honest, not bragging, it’s the truth! I was SO lucky…) still we had myriad problems from time to time… difficult clients, occasional techno problems, ridiculous scheduling changes and upset musicians if we didn’t hire them enough. Hell, somewhere in the late eighties – early nineties the studio changed over to computer recording, and we composers began using a lot more synthesizers and way less live musicians. That fact bred some hard feelings that never went away. They’re still there, in one form or another, 40 years later. Glad I no longer have to deal with them. Besides, it would definitely take some gumption!
For years, gumption was an invisible (actually still is) energizer that nearly all of us took for granted, because we had it naturally… every day! When I now look back on a few of the days in some of my diaries, back in my 40’s, and even ’50’s, I think “My god! Where did I get the energy to do all that in a single day? And then I remember… it wasn’t a matter of having “enough energy” back then, it was simply wanting or needing to do something, then doing it. If we were tired at the end of.a day, that was okay, that was natural. But rarely, almost never did I feel too tired to go out to dinner with friends after a long, hard day, or sit too long at a local watering hole with a buddy, drinking a little too much while plotting our future or solving the problems of the world.
Looking at the larger view of how our country was built and developed, (probably the world and its many cultures for that matter) it almost has to be some combination of desire to build and grow, with greed and drive, which would have to include gumption, wouldn’t it?
One has to wonder if gumption has inherent genetic qualities that some people get, while others don’t. I know that some of us do what we do because everyone else is doing it, or that people we respect and want to be like, are doing it. I have friends like that. For my part, I was fortunate enough to fall in love (and stay in love) with music and chase it for 40 years, to try to continue and improve to be the best I could, until I hit the wall and ran out of steam and desire to improve.
I guess that would translate as passion, with an occasional dash of gumption. Unlike that 92 year-old violinist who told an interviewer that he continues to play because “I think I’m still getting better.” Don’t know what that old guy’s on, but it must be potent. Is there a pill called Extreme Passion? If there is, we know one thing about it… it’s not deadly, but it is fairly rare.
I had a drummer friend, Reid Jorgensen back in Boston, who called me in Atlanta one day. He told me he was celebrating and wanted me to know. I asked him if it was his birthday. He said, “No. I turned 55 two months ago. The reason I’m celebrating is because today I’ve finally decided to stop practicing every day.”
Reid was a fine drummer and a versatile percussionist. He had timpani, vibraphone and a ton of little percussion goodies. Every few years he auditioned for the percussion chair of the Boston Pops. He never got it. Fred Buda held that chair mostly through Reid’s whole life. I’m sure he knew it was as much political as anything. Still, he kept auditioning and practicing for years.
Perhaps gumption is built into all of us, and we either access it or not. I honestly don’t know. For a while I thought it was tied, somehow, to testosterone, but that can’t work because you ladies have it, too. Gumption, that is.
So where does that leave us? Eh, it probably leaves us not caring about gumption anyway, and not caring whether we have it or not. If you want or need to do something, you just by god have to get up and do it, right? Well, maybe. No, probably. But let me tell you this – if you’re lucky enough to live a long, happy and energetic life, there will come a time when you will need to do a thing, and you will, instead, lie in the weeds like me, and wait and hope for gumption to pay you a cameo visit. Trust me on that.
Steve Hulse
