You Can Get a "C" Just for Showing Up

Before I went to college my dad told me there was no excuse for skipping class. “You can get a “C” just for showing up,” he said. His point was that half of success in life comes from the quality of our presence. Kindness and gratitude will get you further than you think. When we focus on what we have it becomes difficult to come up with what we don’t.

I had plenty of examples in my personal life of people who embodied that very spirit. People like my friend Dan, who’d lost both of his parents by the age of 20, yet still found a way to thrive as an orthapaedic surgeon. Instead of using his setbacks as an excuse to retreat he dug his heels in and used those challenges to develop a sense of grit and fortitude that got him into the top medical school in the country.

He taught me we get to choose how we show up in life and that the quality of our contributions begins with the quality of our philosophy - that problems are only meant to test our resolve and be reframed into opportunities; if not over the wall then under. If not under then around. And in time, with enough trial and error, we may even discover we’ve been climbing the wrong wall to begin with.