Most of life is showing up. You do the best you can, which varies from day to day.
Regina Brett
He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.
Benjamin Franklin
Excuses are the tools of the incompetent used to build bridges to nowhere.
William Burroughs
Part of my work with companies involves learning about their processes and talking to the leadership team and longtime employees about what is working and what is not working.
I've worked with people for a long time now, and since companies are collections of people, I look for three things:
Showing up
Following through
Making excuses
These three things are interrelated, and they make a big difference in how things turn out for us.
Showing Up
It's surprising and maybe a little anti-climatic, but showing up is a big part of success. When you see the people who are successful (truly successful, not just wealthy or famous, but the kind of people you want to look up to), you will see that they show up every day.
They don't think about if they need to show up, they don't think about why they're showing up, they don't complain about how they are the one that shows up every day, they simply show up and do what they need to do.
Maybe it's part of their character, but it's also a choice they make. Maybe they've made that choice so many times it doesn't seem like a choice to them anymore, but they still make it.
Showing up, ready to work, is 90% of the battle.
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