“Do you all have a ball, or something? Shouldn’t you toss around a few passes?”

“We don’t have any balls. Actually we haven’t done a warm-up yet. You can write an email about us.”

Jen’s good friend and former teammate Devin was a little cocky. They were pretty sure that age and treachery (and skill) were going to carry them to the win in this semi-final match of this past weekend’s rugby tournament. After all, a few of these women (Jen included) had played on U.S. national teams and were very, very skilled and experienced rugby players. I said, “Well, if you lose this match it’s going to be a different email.”

After the game, Jen was bummed, some of her teammates were bummed. They’d been eliminated.

This email could be about how resting on what you’ve done in the past often isn’t enough to keep up with the right now. The practices you didn’t have last week matter more than the practices you made years ago. The warm-up and ball handling you skipped this morning might have been worthwhile.

But it’s not.

You see, the same kind of thing happened last year. They lost a game they should have probably won and they all (well, most) swore that it wouldn’t happen again, that this year they’d come prepared to win.

But their behaviors as a team didn’t line up with the intentions. Their intentions said, “We’ve still got it and we’re here to win.” Their behaviors said, “Eh, we’ll just show up, have fun, and hope for the best.”

So after a repeat of the same experience, it’s worth examining the intention instead of the behaviors. Usually behaviors reflect the true motivations, or at least the inertia of habits and intentions. If they want to win but they keep showing up unpracticed and unprepared, maybe what they really want is to just play a few games of rugby again for old time’s sake once a summer and that’s it.

And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that.

What’s wrong is being frustrated by the mismatch of your intentions with your behaviors. If you didn’t put in the work to be prepared to be the winner, why are you upset you didn’t win? You got exactly what you should have expected. Something Jen and her teammates recognized and readily admitted immediately after the loss. Jen, and a few others, had prepared individually but they hadn’t practiced and prepared as a team.

It reminds me of one of my favorite parables, the scorpion and the frog. (My friend—we’ll call him A—is thinking about getting scorpion and frog hand tattoos. I think he should do it. A is like Paulie in Goodfellas: he’s made it and he doesn’t owe anybody anything, and probably will never have to ask anyone for anything for the rest of his life.) If you don’t know it, the story holds that a scorpion asks a frog to carry him across the river. The frog is afraid of being stung by the scorpion, but the scorpion convinces them that if that happened they’d both drown so it would not be in its best interest. Suitably convinced, the frog carries the scorpion across the river and is then stung, dooming them both. The scorpion says: “Don’t be so surprised, it’s in my nature to do so.”

In other words, when results match expectations, even when they don’t match your desires, if you want to feel better (you’ll do better when you feel better) then change your desires so they match the expectations.

When I was in school I distinctly remember the sensation I’d get when I was about 80% done with a test. I’d want to literally walk out and just leave it uncompleted. Never mind that this makes no logical sense at all, and that I’d want to quit when I was almost done. That’s just the point where I felt like I had done enough so I could move on to the next thing. Of course that’s no good for your test score.

I love starting new projects. Just ask my wife. At any given time my desk alone has a half dozen partially completed projects of it to say nothing of the garage or other work spaces. The feeling of diving into something new is one of the best parts to me. I don’t mind at all losing a whole day researching a new endeavor just to get the ball rolling on it.

The problem is, most things are useless until completed. It doesn’t do my readers any good if I have a great article 80% finished in my blog drafts. You can’t eat a dinner that is three-quarters finished. Probably no one cares that you started a marathon and finished 80% of it. Neat that you started the Whole30 but the program was designed for 30 days or it would have been called the Whole21.

Finishing is, at least in this writer’s experience, the hard part. Putting the finishing touches on it and saying “Yes, this is finished. Judge it world.”

Or seeing it through to the end when the novelty of a fresh start has worn off and you’ve suffered the monotony of The Work for a few weeks.

Now when I recognize that familiar feeling of wanting to walk away when I’m almost done (now that I think of it seems like a great time to go take the dogs for a quick walk) I recognize it and put my head down to finish.

Because unless you’ve lived such a remarkable life that people want to read your unfinished memoirs..

It probably doesn’t count unless you finish.

In Time Enough for Love, which is a wonderfully strange science fiction tale, Robert Heinlein describes a competent man:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

I’m going to do my best to take on all of these, but for now one will do. And if you’re going to butcher a hog there’s no better way to do it than to turn it into porchetta, the Italian tradition of roasting a whole hog on a spit.

To learn how, you’re going to take a trip with me to Costano, Italy which is about five minutes from where I was born. Costano is known throughout Italy as one of the most famous towns in Italy for porchetta. As Murano is to glass, Costano is to porchetta.

Now, if you want to make porchetta at home but you’re not ready to go whole hog, here’s what you should do.

Ask your butcher for a pork belly, skin on, that’s about 5-6 pounds (you’ll want leftovers) and a tenderloin that’s roughly the same length as the pork belly is wide. Ask for some fresh liver as well.

Make up a mix of seasoning that is 24 parts salt, 2 parts pepper, and 1 part ground fennel. If you can get some sweet fresh wild fennel, use it!

Preheat your oven to 500ºF. Lay the belly skin side down, and season it generously with the spice mix. Add fresh sliced liver if you got it. Place the tenderloin in a third of the belly, and then roll it all up. You should have a tenderloin in the center and about two layers of belly at the thickest point.

Using kitchen twine, tie the roll of pork tightly so that it holds its structure throughout the cooking. When you’re finished, use a sharp knife to poke a few holes through the skin all around, one every few inches or so.

Roast the porchetta roll for 30 minutes before reducing the temperature to 300ºF. How long it takes to cook depends on thickness, not weight, but for a small home roast of this size you can expect about 2 more hours. Ideally, use a meat thermometer to make sure it’s 160º in the center. As the pros say, the pork is done when it’s done.

Let it rest and cool, slice, and serve with a sprinkle of salt.