The Hard Is Only In Your Heart: Tom Hanks On Joe DiMaggio, Paul Newman, And Making It Look Easy
September 15, 2025·0 comments·zg
Even Tom Hanks reverts to feeling like a kid when he’s in front of a childhood hero. That’s a reassuring thing to know. I feel reassured knowing this. He brought it up in an interview with Guy Raz - about the time he met Joe DiMaggio.
Hanks was out for dinner when the maître d’ came up and says something like, “Joe DiMaggio would like to meet you.” Hanks, obviously, cannot refuse or resist this, and, in their conversation he asks him about how cool he always was under pressure. DiMaggio goes full Yoda and says, ‘It always looked easy, except in here” and points to his heart on the word “here” because, he’s Joe DiMaggio, baseball superstar and poet.
Mastery makes for a cruel paradox. The better you get at something, the more “I wish I could do that like you” gets uttered in your presence, the more your internal sense of pressure is going to build. The pressure starts building something, somewhere deep inside you. It has to.
And I’m sure there’s still the fun aspect of it all! There’s a different confidence level you start to be able to unlock, but the same force that drives you to mastery doesn’t just get shutoff once you achieve it, either.
After Hanks tells that story he brings up meeting Paul Newman too. Same type of question and setup. Newman tells him that even legends feel self-conscious on day one. They just figure out how to muster up enough external polish to cover up the internal storm.
Mastery takes strength. Mastery begets strength. Strength is required to deal with those internal and external structures. It’s the opposite of weakness, to care so deeply about a craft and seek mastery. And, it’s deeply personal.
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