It sounds like it should be on a cat poster, but “Showing up is half the battle” is a nice little platitude to live by. I like it because it sets the bar so low. No calls for 18 hour work days. No ascetic monk life style devoted to a cause. No giving up life and family. Simply the minimal viable baseline of taking part in any endeavor–simple, consistent participation.

“Just show up” tells me that mere exposure can do a surprising amount of good. You may not be a key participant, spectating from the sidelines uselessly. For me, I felt especially inept when I first started trying to learn how to troubleshoot production issues at work. I’d sit in on these long zoom calls, trying to follow along. It was hit or miss whether I even understood the conversation going on, let alone say something insightful. I once joked with a more senior developer from my team that my goal in those meetings was to be corrected by our lead site reliability guy 5 times.

You may feel useless. You may say the wrong things. Or even worse, you may feel like you’re getting in the way. But even in those cases, just being there, paying attention, and asking questions, can get you a very long way. Being willing to look stupid is often a prerequisite to learning at all.

It is a very low baseline, but it is still something. There can be many barriers to entry to participating in something. The time costs of showing up can be prohibitive. There may be literal costs. You may not even be among the privileged few who know about something, so participating isn’t even an option.

Still, I think the most common barrier to entry is simple fear. Fear of screwing up, fear that you won’t live up to your own or other’s expectations, fear of wasting time. It’s easy to say in principle you’re okay looking stupid, or okay occasionally being in the way. But it can be hard in the moment to keep your resolve. That’s why setting the bar as low as “just show up” is nice. It drops a lot of the baggage that comes from these things.

What does showing up mean?

Just showing up can mean different things in different contexts, too. On the production calls at work, showing up meant not just being on the call, but attempting to follow along as well. Pulling up charts, looking up terms I hadn’t hear before, maybe noting down things to investigate later. You may not want to interrupt, especially during production fires. But I think it can be appropriate and even helpful to ask “dumb” questions during lulls when people aren’t actively discussing things.

This principle applies beyond work. Relationships live and die on whether you “just show up” This usually means putting in regular effort to reach out. Just calling old high school friends once or twice a year can be more than enough. Having nearby friends over for dinner every once in a while is great. Reaching out to old coworkers to see where their careers have taken them can be great, too. The point is, the “showing up” is repeatedly showing you care, and is infinitely better than just letting these relationships peter out over the years.

“Just showing up” for artistic stuff can mean simply producing art and showing it to the world. It’s all too easy to putter away at the guitar for years by yourself, with nothing to show for it (not me of course). It’s quite another to publicly build a body of work, so others can see that you are committed to doing art and have a track record of finishing things. This is related to Visakan Veerasamy’s idea of “Do it 100 times”. The goal is to be prolific and get your work out there.

I sometimes think of burnout in terms of “just showing up.” Burnout can be pretty vicious, so it’s important to safeguard against it a bit. It’s no good to force yourself to work at full throttle every day. There will be days you will be hyper productive, and days where even doing one or two meaningful things is a struggle. I think one of the keys to avoiding burnout is having enough charity for yourself to recognize this, and be able to still “show up” without forcing yourself too much.

“Just showing up” is similar to consistency, with the important caveat that you disregard the quality. You ditch perfectionism, giving 110%, constant polishing and tinkering. Thankfully, we can make it a long way by just being present, regardless the quality.