Keep Showing Up - It's All About Discipline


“brown dried leaves on sand” by sydney Rae on Unsplash

Keep showing up. Never stop. Keep pressing play. Take another step. Do one more rep. Work for one more minute. Do twenty more miles.

Woody Allen once said 80% of life is just showing up. Showing up is that first step forward. It is that challenge that everyone struggles with. If you are consistent and have the discipline to keep showing up, success will follow. You are now one more step ahead of the mediocre masses. You are one more step further from ordinary. You are further ahead than over half of the people that surround you.

Yet you need to recognize that just showing up once is not going to make you successful. Yes, it is a great achievement that you actually took that first leap and showed up the very first time, but it is the 2nd and the 3rd and the 10th and the 50th time that you show up, that you repeat that’s what makes you successful. Having the discipline and the urgency to keep showing up and doing the hard work. It is not easy to continue to show up. It is very easy for you to give up and to quit, to let apathy set in. 

Quitting is very easy, it always has been. That is why we have a lot of unfinished tasks around the house, and why projects are often late in many companies today.

It takes an effort to show up. It takes courage to show up. It takes bravery to show up. Once you start showing up, you cannot stop showing up. It is now your opportunity to do the next steps, to start doing the hard work. Sometimes the hard work is not the fun work, but the results of the hard work usually result in that return on investment that comes from showing up. Success!

Once you show up, you are not going to just sit there and stare blankly at the space in front of you. Do not think you can just look around and start staring at the people that are near you, waiting for someone to do something. You need to actively participate. Showing up forces you to ask questions, it forces you to respond to questions with answers and it requires action. Activity. It requires you to physically and actively do something and accomplish that particular task.

So now that you showed up, what is next? What are you going to do?


Go forth and be brilliant.

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