Scobbed Knobs

While driving through some hilly country I noticed a knob (an old English word for 'hill' - yes it's true, look it up). It would not have been particularly interesting, except that it happened to be scobbed - a word I am using to refer to the state of...hmm, how do I put this? Picture an almost-completely-shaved head, being scratched all over by someone's knuckles or fingernails. That's a pretty good idea of what a scobbed knob looks like. The actual definition is "picked clean" - I dunno, you figure it out.

What's the point? None, really. I just find it amusing. That, and it rhymes.

This post is actually about success. Weird, I know. And here you were expecting a post all about scobbed knobs. Well, don't worry, there'll be more of that later.

I certainly won't claim that my definition of success is the de-facto standard, or any standard at all, for that matter. This is simply the way I see it, and I have found it to be true on a personal level. I would give most of the credit for this to Mr. Herbert W. Armstrong - the four ideas that weave their way through this post, and my story, are the last four of The Seven Laws of Success, a free booklet by Mr. Armstrong.

I don't believe success can be defined like most other words. Instead, I hope to give you a mental picture that explains the most abstract form of the concept. They say a picture is worth a thousand words...what does that make a mental picture worth - especially one delivered via words on a page?

Imagine you're running. Running literally, but also running out of breath. You are nearing the point where you start to shake and you stop sweating because your body has lost a lot of sweat and is starting to conserve fluid. That thick substance that is certainly too thick to be saliva (but what else could it be?) coats your entire throat, threatening to fling itself out randomly with each misplaced gasp, each breath in which you open your mouth a little too wide, and exhale a little too forcefully.

A few more minutes pass, and you push yourself to continue. This is your perseverance - the endurance to see something past the moment where you first feel like giving up. However, at this point, it isn't all that difficult to continue, either - you have momentum, after all, and it's easier on your body to continue in motion than to completely stop (thus the need for cool down laps after a long run).

Soon, you are really beginning to ache. You can feel the blood pulsing, almost pounding in your feet, and your pace slows without your consent. Your breath is more ragged and shallow, and each new step feels more painful than the last. Exhaustion is setting in, and you are starting to feel a tad dizzy.

What's this? An obstacle ahead! A large boulder looms before you, and there seems to be no way around it. There is a long drop off on either side of the path, and there isn't enough room on either side to squeeze by. It's looking like you'll have to stop completely.

But not you! In addition to perseverance (and the drive which put you on the road to begin with) you also have resourcefulness - you have trained your jump height, and you also notice some great footholds on the front of the boulder. Aiming carefully in the last few seconds, your body supplies a small adrenaline rush as you scale the boulder and land shakily on the other side, continuing your stride unbroken.

On a minor and unrelated note, the narrow hill upon which the boulder was sitting looked quite scraggly. The grass was patchy and ragged, and the whole bit could therefore be considered a scobbed knob. (See? I told you there'd be more. But just wait! There's even more yet. But I digress.)

Now that you can see ahead, past the boulder, you notice the trail is much, much longer and harder than you imagined. There are far more obstacles coming up, and you're not even to the halfway point yet. Discouragement sets in, and you begin to wonder if finishing the run is even possible at this point.

Here is the critical moment. The situation has changed from a few minutes ago. You have now come so far that it would be quite difficult to continue - you have almost as long a run back as you do forwards, though certainly with less obstacles, and a route you've already blazed through, no less. Familiarity is on your side. Going forward doesn't even seem to be an option - in fact it seems so difficult that giving up is precisely what you want to do, and it seems to be the only way out.

Going forward means success, regardless of the outcome. Going forward means you overcame your pain and exhaustion at the moment it mattered most, instead of giving up. Regardless of how far you are able to continue, odds are you will have gone farther than anyone else who ran down that same path.

Success, then, is largely a measure of your ability to discern these critical moments, and make the right choice at each one of them. This goes along nicely with one of my favorite quotes:

"To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith."
-W. H. Auden

Thus, I ever so subtly imply (by including this quote) that faith is part of the measure of success. Quite a large part, I believe.

It's the end of the track. You made it. Breathing heavily, you ball up your hands into fists and use them to vigorously rub your head - partially to wipe the sweat off, and partially out of insanity and exhaustion. In the process, you've just scobbed your knob. It was inevitable - just like those critical moments where we choose, often unknowingly, between success and failure.

Failures are certainly stepping stones to success, I won't argue that - but just like stepping stones, if you spend all your time on them, going in circles, and don't make any progress toward your goal, you're likely to end up wearing them out - leaving you with a worn out path of scobbed knobs.

So you might as well accept the fact. Your knob is going to get scobbed one way or the other - why not make a success out of it?

I'll leave you with a short poem I came up with on the spot just for this post. It's about scobbed knobs, of course! It's written in my favorite form of verse, the limerick. However, most limericks are only a single stanza, and I seem determined to break that trend.

Scobbed Knobs

On a hill lived a farmer named Bob,
Where he planted some corn on the cob.
But the crop was so small,
That the birds ate it all.
All they left was a very scobbed knob.

Now the cobs were also quite scobbed,
And poor Bob, he really felt robbed.
He made the cobs into cobbler,
So the birds would gobble-er,
And over the fence it was lobbed!

The birds, they ate and they gobbled,
Then they reeled and babbled and hobbled.
Then they flapped and slobbered,
They knew they'd been clobbered.
By Bob's scobbed-knob cobs, they'd been cobbled.