Should Showing Up Be More Than Enough?
Some disciplines only ask one thing of you: show up. Yoga is one of them. It does not care how tired you are or whether you’ve had a bad day, the only requirement is presence.
We used to place value on people who showed up because showing up meant consistency. And consistency, paired with a good attitude and a willingness to learn, has always been the seed of mastery.
So why, in 2025, does it feel like showing up is no longer enough?
Our economic systems seem misaligned. But it hasn’t always been this way. Consider the people who shaped entire fields without credentials:
Vincent van Gogh, who had no arts degree.
Nikola Tesla, who studied engineering and physics but never earned a formal degree. His expertise came through practical work in telephony and electricity.
The Wright brothers, who built the first successful airplane without formal schooling, relying instead on curiosity, reading, and relentless experimentation.
These examples remind us that learning through practice, persistence, and showing up has long been enough to produce world changing results.
Yet today, despite more people holding degrees than at any other point in history, we face a strange paradox:
Employers can’t fill roles.
Job seekers can’t find work.
Education remains the main currency of opportunity (even when it doesn’t align with industry needs.)
Right now, the system looks like this: go to school → get a job (if you’re lucky) → take on a mortgage (if you’re lucky) → die (inevitable).
Education is valuable. But we’ve let it become overvalued. What if we dialed it back, not by discarding it, but by rethinking its role?
What if employers took the lead on education and reskilling? What if showing up with consistency, curiosity, and willingness to learn counted for more than a piece of paper?
Because as W. Edwards Deming once said:
“A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
Maybe that’s the tragedy of our moment: we are surrounded by good people who keep showing up, and still, the system swallows them whole.
So the real question is this: how many more good people are we willing to waste before we decide that showing up should be enough?