On Showing Up

Everything I've been lucky enough to accomplish in life, I've done just by showing up regularly. Showing up to the job, to the meeting, to the gym, hell, to your living room floor for stretches at five in the morning. You don't even have to decide - you already made that decision.

Maybe you don't want to work out. But if you decide that, at 0600 every morning, I'm going to work out, that's it. The decision's already been made. If you just show up, change into that workout gear, and show up to the gym, you can't help but pick up a few weights while you're there.

The same goes for the meetings. At the risk of encouraging more useless meetings, sometimes the point of a gathering is that it happens in the first place. There's a reliable place where meaningful discussion can take place. To cancel something like that "because there's nothing to talk about" misses the point entirely.

Just as we show up physically (or virtually, as it were), we also need to show up mentally and emotionally. Let me ask you something, if you decide to spend the next hour of your life in a gathering, in read-only mode (never saying anything, only listening), then what the hell are you doing here? Short of corporate espionage, I cannot think of a reason where it's worth your time to be a passive member of a gathering of people. If you don't have anything to add, then get the notes from someone else. Showing up mentally and emotionally means you have something to contribute to the conversation.

If you regularly show up, create that sense of reliability in yourself that others can trust, you'll find a lot of "lucky breaks" just happen.