The Most Powerful Lesson That Made Hemingway A Prolific Writer
And how it can make you more productive in your own life.
Ernest Hemingway is famous for his influence on 20th-century fiction. He published a tremendous volume of work that became classics in American literature.
But Hemingway was much more than a writer. “Papa,” as he was lovingly called, possessed remarkable skills when it came to the great outdoors, one of which was marksmanship.
Hemingway could take down a black bear in a single shot. He could shoot a large bull elk through the lungs, on the run, at a hundred yards. A companion astonished at Hemingway’s skills said,
“I saw Ernest jump from his horse, cover a hundred-yard dash on foot, and drop a running antelope at 275 yards. That’s rifle shooting, if you ask me.”
What made him so remarkable? One reason is that Hemingway learned how to shoot from a very young age. By the time he was two and a half, he had learned the basics of shooting a gun, and by the time he was four, he could handle a pistol.
But more than the number of years, it was the quality of practice that yielded such amazing results.
