Avon & Stringer - hard enough, smart enough

"I look at you these days, String, you know what I see? I see a man without a country. Not hard enough for this right here and maybe, just maybe, not smart enough for them out there."

That's Avon Barksdale talking to his partner-in-crime Stringer Bell in The Wire. Stringer wanted to go legit - apply business-school thinking to the streets. Avon wanted to stay in the game. Neither could fully be what the other world required.

I think about that line a lot. For me, it goes something like:

Too commercially minded for the artists.

Too weird for the people in the good suits.

Too independent for the org chart.

Too small for the VC spreadsheet.

Not smart enough for the academics, maybe. Not hard enough for the hustlers, definitely.

And, alas, too big for those 34" trousers that fitted me last summer.

(You'll have your own list.)

Avon already had a name for it: a man without a country.

There's a version of this where we keep trying to get hard enough, or smart enough, for worlds that don't quite fit. And there's another where we build something that works with our nature rather than against it - gaps, peculiar Venn diagrams and all.

Maybe being not quite right for either world is the point.

It didn't work for Stringer, of course. (It rarely works for anyone in The Wire.) But that doesn't mean it won't work for us.

P.S. If you want to know what good narrative writing looks like… follow me here … no, not really. Look at some of the writing on The Wire. Sheeeeeet.