showing up

Recently I had dinner with several very successful friends and in a fascinating conversation we talked about what was different about people who succeed vs. people who don't. It was fun for me to be a part of this because, in truth, I was probably the least successful person at the table! I need to preface this by saying that each of us defines "success" in our own way. We were talking about professional and financial success specifically.

I have known this group of people for a long time, and we have a lot of friends in common that have not achieved the same level of professional success that this group has. The first thing that we all agreed upon was that we were not, as a group, any smarter or more talented than those that were still struggling with their careers. It took us a while, however, to come up with an explanation of why we were succeeding when our equally talented and driven friends were not.

We began to discuss specific situations that we saw our friends in to see if we could find common denominators in their behavior and then contrast it to our own. After much debate, we decided that there were two factors that distinguished us, as a group from our other friends. What is startling about this is its simplicity. The difference as we saw it was:

a) We were quick to analyze the success of what we were doing and didn't waste our time continuing to work on things that were not getting us towards our goal.

b) We showed up.

The first point is relatively simple. We tended to be less emotional about our careers and were willing to say, "this isn't working" and move on. Our friends who were not succeeding tended to either emotionally invest themselves in a project to the point that they could not distance themselves from it. They tended to continue to work on projects that were clearly not going to be successful because they saw themselves as "failing" if they gave up. Rather than learning from their experiences, cutting their losses and moving on to the next idea, they let themselves be dragged down until they could not recover.

The second point was the most striking to me: Showing up. It seems like such a simple thing!

In talking about this we realized that our examples of people who were still struggling with their careers tended to smack of "self-sabotage". They were given opportunities for promotion and then missed deadlines. They stayed up too late and then slept through their alarm. They quit work at 5pm every day, regardless of what needed to be done. In other words, they didn't make any attempt to go an extra mile to distinguish themselves.

A specific example really touched a cord with me: One of our friends had the opportunity to get to know some people in his industry that could have been very important to his career. This involved a weekend retreat that his employer had paid for but did not require him to attend. In order to do this, however, he would have to drive an hour and a half in each direction in the morning and on the night after the event on both Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday morning he woke up and decided he didn't feel like getting up early to drive to the conference. He slept in and spent the weekend at home.

You can probably guess the outcome of this story. Someone else in his department did make the drive. She had about four years less experience than he did and worked under him in the department. At the meeting, she met the industry movers and shakers who were impressed with her. She was named to a committee working directly with these people. Six months later she was promoted over him.

I'm not claiming that all of this was simply because of that weekend. However, the bottom line is that she made the extra effort and he didn't. (It may have been just one of a dozen examples where she made the effort and he didn't!) However, he is now very bitter about this and sees her as a schemer. He is thinking about quitting his job because his pride is damaged over her promotion.

At the table that night, one of my friends said something that I thought was particularly profound in it's truth and simplicity. She said that succeeding by definition meant that you were doing something extraordinary. Success tends to be doing something that exceeds what others do. For that reason, it isn't reasonable to expect that you can put out an ordinary amount of effort to achieve an extraordinary result. However, that doesn't mean that becoming successful is painful or difficult, it does mean that you may have to do what others are not willing to do to distinguish yourself.

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