My Brush with the Freddie Patek Way
So, this whole Freddie Patek thing. It wasn’t like I woke up one day and decided, “Today, I’m gonna get into vintage baseball players.” Nah, life just throws these curveballs, or in this case, maybe a slider, right at you when you least expect it.
It all started when I got stuck with this project at work. You know the kind. The one that’s been passed around like a hot potato until it lands squarely in your lap because everyone else suddenly had “urgent” stuff to do. Yeah, that kind. I was looking at this mountain of work, feeling like I was about to get buried. Totally out of my depth, or so I thought.
Then, old Jimmy from accounting, who’s seen more company changes than I’ve had hot dinners, he shuffles by my desk. Sees the panic on my face, I guess. He just kind of grunted, “Kid, you need to channel some Freddie Patek on this one,” and then just walked off. Freddie who? I was clueless. Sounded like a character from a cheap detective novel.
So, my first step in this “practice” was figuring out what on earth Jimmy was on about. That evening, instead of just staring at the ceiling worrying, I actually fired up the computer and typed in “Freddie Patek.” Turns out, he was a baseball player. A shortstop. And get this, the guy was tiny for a pro athlete, like 5’5″. They called him “The Flea.” Played with a ton of heart, apparently, and was part of a World Series team.
What got me wasn’t just the stats. It was the stories of his grit. How he played way bigger than his size. It kind of clicked. Jimmy wasn’t talking about hitting home runs; he was talking about the fight, the hustle.
Alright, next up was trying to actually apply this… this “Patek Principle,” I guess. Sounds a bit daft, I know. But I was at the point where I’d try anything. So, the next day, I faced that monster project again. But instead of seeing this one huge, unbeatable thing, I thought, okay, Flea-mode. What’s the smallest, most annoying part of this I can just latch onto and get done?
- I started breaking down the tasks into really small, almost silly little pieces.
- I’d focus on just one tiny bit. Get it done. Then look for the next tiny bit.
- When I hit a wall, which happened a lot, instead of just giving up for the day, I’d try to buzz around the problem, find a different angle, another small piece I could chip away at.
It wasn’t pretty. It was slow. There were days I thought I was making zero progress, just spinning my wheels. And let’s be clear, I didn’t suddenly become some kind of project-destroying machine. Some afternoons, I still just wanted to close the laptop and walk away. But I kept that image in my head – this little guy, “The Flea,” probably facing down guys who looked like giants to him.
And here’s the real takeaway, the “record” of this little experiment of mine. This Freddie Patek approach, it wasn’t about some sudden miracle. It was about changing how I looked at the problem. It was about persistence. It was about not letting the sheer size of the challenge, or how small and incapable I felt, stop me from even trying. It was about showing up and nibbling away, day after day.
I did eventually get that project over the line. It wasn’t elegant, and it took a chunk out of me, but it got done. Old Jimmy just gave me a knowing nod when he heard. “Told ya. Flea power,” was all he said. It sounds a bit corny, maybe, but that little piece of unsolicited advice, that name of a ballplayer I’d never heard of, it actually worked. Not because of baseball magic, but because it gave me a different way to frame the struggle and just keep plugging away.
