Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Standup Nobody Else Showed Up To
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Stand-Up Nobody Else Showed Up To. Here we go. Every summer, about 1,200 new cadets arrive at West Point for something called Beast Barracks. It is six weeks built to break people down and see who is left standing. Some of these cadets are the fittest recruits in their class. Some of them aced every test to get there. By the end of those six weeks, though, a good number from both groups have quit. Angela Duckworth wanted to know what is actually separating the ones who stayed from the ones who left. She's a psychologist. She spent years studying this exact question, not just at West Point, but in classrooms and sales offices too. What she found surprised a lot of people. Fitness scores did not predict who would finish beast barracks, neither did academic record. What predicted it was a short questionnaire measuring one thing whether a person kept working toward a goal after it stopped being fun. She summed up what she found in one line when she said enthusiasm is common, endurance is rare. Now let's sit with that for a second, because it cuts against how most of us picture determination. We tend to imagine grit as intensity. Someone fired up, loud about their goals, visibly passionate every single day. That's not what Duckworth found. Plenty of the cadets who dropped out of beast barracks looked just as motivated as everyone else on day one. The gap showed up later. It showed up in week four, once the adrenaline was gone and the work was still there. Here's what that looks like outside the Army. A logistics company rolled out a new warehouse management system last year. The kickoff was the kind of event companies throw when they want people excited. Free t shirts, a countdown clock on the homepage, an all hands meeting meeting with a slide that said the future starts today. A project manager named Marcus ran point on the rollout. In that first week, he had plenty of company. People stopped by his desk to ask how it was going. People volunteered for the pilot group. Fourteen months later the countdown clock was gone. So was most of that early energy. The rollout had hit its unglamorous middle, data migration bugs, workarounds nobody had planned for, a system that worked but not quite the way anyone had promised. Marcus was still at his desk every Tuesday at seven in the morning. He was running the same kind of stand up he had run in month two. He was filing the same kind of ticket. Almost nobody else from that kickoff crowd was still showing up. Here's where people usually misread this. They hear endurance and they think it means never losing momentum, never feeling tired of a project. That's not realistic, and it is not what separated Marcus from everyone else either. He got bored sometimes. He got frustrated sometimes. Some weeks he probably did not want to be in that seven o'clock meeting any more than anyone else did. The difference was not the feeling. It was what he did regardless of the feeling. That is the real reframe here. Endurance is not a mood you manage to hang on to. It's a decision you keep making after the mood that got you started has already left the building. Enthusiasm shows up on its own, usually right at the start, free of charge. Endurance has to be chosen again on a Tuesday nobody's excited about, long after anyone was handing out t-shirts. Now think about where AI tools fit into a story like this. Ask one to write a kickoff memo, a launch plan, a rallying all hand slide. It will hand you something polished in 10 seconds. It will sound exactly as energized on the hundredth request as it did on the first, because it's not actually feeling anything at all. It never has to sit through month nine of a rollout that has lost its shine. It never gets bored, never gets tired, never has a Tuesday where it would rather be anywhere else. That might sound like an advantage, but it means the tool cannot teach you the one thing this story is actually about. It cannot show you what it costs to keep showing up once the excitement is gone. Because it never pays that price itself. Writing the plan was never the hard part. Staying with it is, and that is still entirely on the person, not the software. So here's something worth trying this week. Think of a project you kicked off with real energy a while back. Three months ago, six months ago, longer. Ask yourself honestly who is still actually working it and whether you are one of them. If you are, notice what that has actually cost you lately, not what it cost you on day one. And if you lead a team, go find whoever is still quietly doing the unglamorous version of that work long after the kickoff energy wore off. Most of them have never been thanked for it because nobody throws a party for endurance. Tell them you noticed anyway. Carry this forward past today. The leaders worth following are not the ones who can get a room fired up on day one. Plenty of people can do that. They are the ones still at their desk in month nine. They are doing the same careful work they did back in month two. Nobody is watching anymore, and there's no countdown clock left to look at. Marcus's rollout finally stabilized in month 16. The fixes that got it there were not dramatic. They were the same small, unglamorous fixes he had been filing since month two. He filed them one Tuesday at a time, long after everyone else had moved on to the next exciting thing.