Congrats on Showing Up. That's Apparently Enough Now.
Field Day.
My daughter ran like she was being chased. Crossed the finish line first. By a lot. The kind of first where the kid in second is still rounding the corner and she's already standing there wondering what's next.
You know what they gave her?
A ribbon. Like a county fair.
Same ribbon as the kid who finished last. Same ribbon as every other kid on the field. At a county fair at least they sort you by weight class. Here everybody just gets the same sad little ribbon and a juice box and we all pretend that's fine.
And look — I'm not out here trying to make three year olds cry. But I am out here asking what exactly we think we're building.
Because somewhere along the way we decided that competition was the problem. That winning made other kids feel bad. That losing was a wound too deep to risk. So we smoothed it all out. Everybody finishes. Everybody gets a ribbon. Everybody goes home feeling roughly the same amount of okay.
And I get it. Nobody wants to watch a little kid sob into their juice box. That's not fun for anyone. But there's a difference between being kind and lying to kids about how the world works. We crossed that line and kept walking.
Because the world my daughter is going to walk into doesn't care that she showed up. It cares what she did when she got there. Her future boss isn't handing out ribbons for attendance. Her clients won't stick around because she seemed like she was trying. The market is not interested in effort. It's interested in results.
Now sure — Evel Knievel got paid for the attempt. Didn't matter if he cleared the buses or ate the pavement, the check cleared either way. But those jobs are few and far between. And last I checked they weren't hiring at the Snake River Canyon.
Nobody's going to protect her from losing a deal. Or a job. Or a customer who went somewhere else. And when that happens — and it will happen — what do we want her to do with that feeling? Because if we've spent her whole childhood telling her that showing up is enough, she's going to be completely unprepared for the moment the world disagrees.
We're so busy protecting kids from the feeling of losing that we forgot losing is actually useful. It's information. It tells you something's off and you need to fix it. It builds something in you that comfort never can. Take that away and you don't get confident kids — you get fragile ones who've never had to recalibrate. Never had to dig. Never had to figure out what they're actually made of.
My dad didn't hand me anything. Not because he was cruel. Because he understood that the struggle was the point. That figuring it out — even when it hurt — was how you built something that lasted. I'm not sure we remember that anymore.
Preslow asked me on the way home if she was getting something special since she actually won.
I told her yeah. She gets to know she won.
She thought about that for a second and said okay.
That's enough. That should always be enough.
Turns out that's a rare thing now.
"The world doesn't grade on effort. Might as well teach them that before it does." — Bob