The Value of “Just” Showing Up

My siblings are pairs skaters. Every day, they wake up at 5am to skate for three hours. Sometimes, after returning home to do school and work, they return to the ice rink to skate again. Even when they don’t skate twice a day, they frequently do an off-ice workout in the afternoon. They’re devoted. They’re serious.

Still, they’re hardly the best team out there. They are now at the third-highest level, and will stop being competitive before advancing, because they started late. Unlike many skaters, who devote all their time to the sport, my siblings have significant academic commitments which they refuse to sacrifice to spend more time on the ice.

And yet, they get to Nationals. Recently, even, a few internationals. They didn’t expect it, but it happened. How?

They “just” showed up.

Putting in the effort every single day to keep up with the blistering pace of competitive figure skating is hard. The age brackets for the levels work such that if you’re not putting in as much effort as my siblings are, you just plain don’t get to be competitive. Sorry, have a nice day! The requirements for pairs are even harder, because not just one, but two skaters have to be devoted enough to put that much time in. Not only that, both of them need to be good at doing jumps – if you’ve ever watched the Olympics on TV, you know jumping is hard.

My siblings get national and international assignments, because they are one of less than twelve pairs teams at their level in the country. They show up. There’s no “just” about it.

They say it’s not enough to just show up. But is that really true? To “just” show up, you need to have the necessary skills to get in the door, you need to be reliable and consistent, you need to be able to put in the work every day. That’s valuable. That’s important. And those are skills a lot of people don’t have.

When people hunt for jobs, the focus is on the job-specific skills: what programming languages do they know, how proficient are they with Excel, do they have the appropriate certifications, etc. And those are important. But many job-seekers act as if those things are all that matters.

In reality, being reliable and dependable is just as important. There are tons of people who have the job-specific skills, but who aren’t reliable. They get tired, they get bored, they see a shiny object, they would rather be doing something else. They don’t show up. If you “just” show up, you can be better than them.

Show up.

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