 Thanksgiving Is Always On a ThursdayHolidays are an interesting phenominon. They were once sacred days that the nation stopped to observe a great moment in the history of our nation, or our faith. Schools were out of session, businesses shut down, and everyone took the opportunity to stop and honor the day.
Those times seem to be over. I mean, Thanksgiving almost seems like the prelude to Christmas, given the ever growing Black Friday push. And, maybe some of these holidays should be examined for their true merit in today’s world. I’m not knowledgeable enough to debate that - I mean, celebrating those who can talk like a pirate every September 19th seems like a bit much but what do I know. I would, however, like to propose a weekly holiday that would positively impact your world. It requires no days off work, no store discounts or sales, and has no unwritten dress code. Thankful Thursdays. Why Should We Care? We should care because we suck at saying thank you. Kids do. Adults do. Professionals do. We’re not good at it. And, us not being good at it helps others not be good at it. So, we end up in a world with less appreciation for the good things that are happening and more contempt for the bad things that are happening. What if we just took a day to intentionally share our appreciation? What if we committed to be intentional about thanking our janitorial staff? Our bus drivers? The fast food workers handing us our food? Our family? Our friends? Our competitors? I’m convinced we don’t realize how contagious positive actions can be? It’s every bit as transferable as any disease. Everytime we share our appreciation for someone or something, we are more likely to find someone or something else we are thankful for. But more importantly, we are encouraging those around us to continue on by letting them know their work is appreciated. And, maybe - just maybe they’ll begin to share their appreciation a little more often. Saying thank you lifts people. It makes their, and your, life better. We all feel it. All we have to do is say it. REAL TALK - Action Steps Observing Thankful Thursday has become a highlight of the week for many people that have embraced this holiday. Occasionally it’s to someone that has helped me throughout the week, but more often than not I write to someone that may not realize I’m thankful for them - a former teacher, a friend I’ve thought about but haven’t talked to in awhile, a player ... You can’t go wrong. Here are a few ways to observe Thankful Thursday with your team or by yourself:
Official holiday or not, Thankful Thursday is worth observing. It’s probably even a little more meaningful if it remains as it is - reserved for those that see value in lifting those around them and consistently make the effort to do so. Checkout Surrender the Outcome on Amazon and order The Score That Matters with Ryan Hawk & Brook Cupps. The latest blog from Blue Collar Grit can be found here!
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 Excellence is RebellionMichael Phelps didn’t just work hard. He was different. While most swimmers took Sundays off, Phelps trained every single day for five years straight. That’s 1,825 consecutive days in the pool. Fatigue, burnout, or even boredom would have been concerns for most swimmers, but Phelps wasn’t most swimmers and had no desire to be. His coach, Bob Bowman, points to a simple decision to just outwork everyone as a turning point in Phelps’ career. He swam 70,000 to 100,000 yards a week, often training twice a day during that time. Phelps even slept in a high-altitude chamber to simulate thinner air and boost his endurance.
If that wasn’t different enough, he also embraced outside the box methods like intense visualization, which happened to pay off bigtime for him. Before every race, Phelps would mentally rehearse every stroke, every turn, every possible scenario - even something as random as the possibility of his goggles breaking … like they did in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. No problem, he had been there before. Phelps still won gold and set a world record. Phelps rebelled against tradition. He rejected the idea of “normal” training, “normal” rest, and “normal” limits. He chose to be different. And that difference made him the most decorated Olympian in history. Why Should We Care? Leadership and excellence are much more about standing out than fitting in. Phelps’ story is a masterclass in rebellion against mediocrity. Leaders who want to build something extraordinary must be willing to do what others won’t. That might mean working when others rest, thinking when others react, or believing when others doubt. Nonetheless, you can’t be the same. In a society that rewards conformity and comfort, choosing excellence is a radical act. It requires saying no to the easy path and yes to the hard, weird, lonely one. It means building habits that others don’t understand and making sacrifices that others won’t make. It means holding a vision that others have never imagined, can’t even see, and often don’t want to see. Excellence creates gravity. When we choose to operate at a higher standard, we lift others with us. Teams rise to meet the energy of a leader who refuses to settle. Rebellion to excellence is more than personal, it’s contagious. When we choose to be different, we give others permission to do the same. When we rebel against the status quo we normalize ambition, discipline, and vision in environments that often reward comfort. The ripple effect of our rebellion can redefine what’s possible for everyone around us. REAL TALK - Action Steps So how do we channel our inner Phelps? Here are three ways to start rebelling toward excellence today:
Excellence is the daily decision to be different. By defying the average and embracing the discomfort that greatness demands, we begin to accept and eventually appreciate our own uniqueness. And once the confidence in that starts to flow, it doesn’t stop. Checkout Surrender the Outcome on Amazon and order The Score That Matters with Ryan Hawk & Brook Cupps. The latest blog from Blue Collar Grit can be found here!  Silent AcceptanceI know you remember perusing the empty video tape boxes organized neatly in alphabetical order, with a special section just for “new releases”. A trip to Blockbuster was always met with anticipation - except when the movie you were dying to see wasn’t in!
In 2000, Blockbuster was the king of the entertainment industry. With 9,000 stores and a market value of $5 billion, they were the movie rental industry. In late fees alone, they collected $800 million from customers. That’s 16% of their total revenue. Late fees were pure profit from customers who failed to return movies on time. Smart business by Blockbuster executives - except their customers hated them … like really hated them. They resented the $1 per day fees that could double or even triple the cost of their rental. Customers cited the anxiety of having to rush back to the store before the deadline as a major frustration. One customer, Reed Hastings, was charged $40 for returning Apollo 13 six weeks late. While that single late charge made them $40 the frustration sparked an idea that would eventually destroy Blockbuster entirely. Even as customer complaints grew, Blockbuster's leadership continued to ignore the concern. Clearly, it was making them too much money to address. By 2004, when Reed Hasting’s Netflix (yea, one of the co-founders of Netflix was spurned into action by a $40 late fee from Blockbuster!) was gaining momentum with its no-late-fee model. A desperate attempt to remove, then reinstate late fees in 2010, just as streaming was taking over, was futile. It was too late, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy later that year. The company that had quietly accepted customer frustration was forced to watch as Netflix built a $280 billion empire on the foundation of the very pain point Blockbuster had dismissed. Why Should We Care? Our demise rarely announces itself with dramatic failures. It begins with silent acceptance. It’s the small things at first. Things that don’t necessarily threaten the core of the business - like late fees or touching lines, for example. Small concessions often compound into massive vulnerabilities. When we fail, or things go wrong, we often wonder how we got here. This is the answer. Silent acceptance is the start of the deterioration. It's rarely a single catastrophic event. It’s a thousand small compromises that we notice but choose not to address. Each instance seems too small to warrant confrontation, too minor to disrupt operations, too petty to make a priority. But silent acceptance doesn't maintain stability, it initiates the decline. These issues seem perfectly manageable until they’re not. Our personal pursuit of excellence follows the same pattern. High achievers who begin to struggle often trace their decline back to slipping standards they silently accepted. We tolerate work that is "good enough" when we once demanded excellence. We accepted behaviors from ourselves we’d never accept from others. We let small disciplines slide because "just this once" won't matter. This silent self-acceptance of lowered standards is exactly how excellence erodes from the inside out. The most dangerous lie isn't the big one you tell others - it's the small one you tell yourself about why declining standards don't really matter. REAL TALK - Action Steps Preventing silent acceptance requires intentional systems that surface small problems before they become threats to who we are striving to be. Here are a few ideas to get started:
Excellence lives or dies in the small moments when we choose between speaking up or staying silent. Once silent acceptance becomes your pattern, decline becomes inevitable. Checkout Surrender the Outcome on Amazon and order The Score That Matters with Ryan Hawk & Brook Cupps. The latest blog from Blue Collar Grit can be found here!  Okay With ItChris Bosh, a member of Team USA Basketball in the 2008, clearly remembers one of the defining moments of the team heading into the 2008 Olympics. “We’re in Las Vegas and we all come down from the team breakfast at the start of the whole training camp,” Bosh recalls. “And Kobe comes in with ice on his knees and sweat drenched through his workout gear. And I’m like, ‘It’s 8 o’clock in the morning. Where is he coming from?”
Several other members of the ‘Redeem Team’, as the group would come to be known, embraced Kobe’s extra work mentality. Stars like, LeBron James and Dwayne Wade were among the earliest adopters. On the morning of Bosh’s observation Wade added, “Everybody else just woke up. We’re all yawning, and he’s already three hours and a full workout into his day.” While it was viewed by some as obsessive, it became contagious to others. What few appreciated is that Kobe wasn't waking up at 4 AM because he loved it. He wasn't bouncing out of bed with joy at the prospect of predawn workouts. He did it because he understood a truth of life - you don’t get what you want, you get what you’re willing to sacrifice for. Anything worth having requires hard work, and you don't need to love hard work to do it. But, you better be okay with it. Contrary to the stories surrounding Kobe’s legendary work ethic, he wasn’t a man in love with the grind as much as he was a man who had made peace with it. He had accepted that excellence requires doing things you don't want to do, at times you don't want to do them, for reasons that won't feel satisfying in the moment. That acceptance, not passion for suffering, is what separated Kobe from everyone else. Why Should We Care? Leadership advice abounds with guidance on ‘falling in love with the process’ or ‘learning to love the grind’ in order to achieve success. That would be great if we always enjoyed every aspect of the process or the work we do, but we don’t. Regardless of our profession or position, there are things we enjoy doing more and things we enjoy doing less. Loving every aspect of your responsibilities is not a requirement, and shouldn’t even be an expectation. What we actually need is something more realistic - we need to be okay with hard work. We need to accept it as the non-negotiable price of anything meaningful without requiring it to be enjoyable. Stop thinking you have to love it and start convincing yourself that you can handle it. So many leaders out there are waiting to feel motivated, waiting for the work to become enjoyable, waiting for some magical shift where discipline becomes effortless. It’s not happening. Meanwhile, there’s another group of leaders out there who sustain excellence and have simply made peace with discomfort. When you stop requiring yourself to love hard things and simply require yourself to embrace them, you eliminate the internal resistance that exhausts most people before they even begin. It’s okay to not particularly enjoy something yet do it anyway. It’s actually more than okay, it’s empowering because I know I have the power and willingness to choose it - even when it sucks. REAL TALK - Action Steps Shifting from needing to love hard work to simply accepting it requires honest acknowledgment of what you're actually experiencing and deliberate practice in tolerating discomfort without drama. Here are a few thoughts to move along that path:
The most sustainable path to excellence isn't falling in love with hard work. It's making peace with it. The standard worth pursuing is not a passion for suffering, but acceptance of it as the price of anything worth having. Checkout Surrender the Outcome on Amazon and order The Score That Matters with Ryan Hawk & Brook Cupps. The latest blog from Blue Collar Grit can be found here! |
About bcI'm a teacher, coach, and parent seeking excellence while defining success on my own terms. Archives
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