{"id":114,"date":"2013-02-13T14:12:09","date_gmt":"2013-02-13T19:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/02\/ninety-percent-of-life-is-just-showing-up-vdt.html"},"modified":"2013-02-13T14:12:09","modified_gmt":"2013-02-13T19:12:09","slug":"ninety-percent-of-life-is-just-showing-up-vdt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/02\/ninety-percent-of-life-is-just-showing-up-vdt.html","title":{"rendered":"Ninety percent of life is just showing up. —VDT"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\n<\/a>\nI hate to agree with the VDT, but I do with this editorial of 8 February 2013,\n\nThe importance of \u2018showing up\u2019<\/a>,\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nIf you can’t show up for meetings at least 90 percent of the time,\nyou shouldn’t have sought office or volunteered for an authority\nseat in the first place.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n-jsq\n<\/p>\n

\nPS: This is what Woody Allen actually said,\nwhich has pretty much the same meaning, in\n\nWoody Allen Interview by Vicky Cristina Barcelona,\n15 August 2008.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nYou have to do the stuff. Everything in life turns out to be a\n\n<\/a>\ndistraction from the real thing you want to do. There are a million\ndistractions and when I was a kid I was very disciplined. I knew\nthat the other kids weren’t. I was the one able to do the thing, not\nbecause I had more talent, maybe less, but because they simply\nweren’t applying themselves. As a kid I wanted to do magic tricks. I\ncould sit endlessly in front of mirror, practicing, practicing,\nbecause I knew if you wanted to do the tricks you’ve got to do the\nthing. I did that with the clarinet, when I was teaching, I did that\nwith writing. This is the most important thing in my life because I\nsee people striking out all the time. It’s not because they don’t\nhave talent, or because they don’t want to be, but because they\ndon’t put the work in to do it. They don’t have the discipline to do\nit. This was something I learned myself. I also had a very strict\nmother who was no nonsense about that stuff. She said \u2018If you\ndon’t do it, then you aren’t going to be able to do the thing.’ It’s\nas simple as that. I said this to my daughter, if you don’t practice\nthe guitar, when you get older you wouldn’t be able to play it. It’s\nthat simple. If you want to play the guitar, you put a half hour in\neveryday, but you have to do it. This has been the biggest guiding\nprinciple in my life when I was younger and it stuck. I made the\nstatement years ago which is often quoted that\n\n80 percent of life is showing up.<\/span>\nPeople used to always say to me that they wanted to\nwrite a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a\nnovel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the\nway to having something happen. All the other people struck out\nwithout ever getting that pack. They couldn’t do it, that’s why they\ndon’t accomplish a thing, they don’t do the thing, so once you do\nit, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you\nare more than half way towards something good happening. So that I\nwas say my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have\nfailed me.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I hate to agree with the VDT, but I do with this editorial of 8 February 2013, The importance of \u2018showing up\u2019, If you can’t show up for meetings at least 90 percent of the time, you shouldn’t have sought office or volunteered for an authority seat in the first place. -jsq PS: This is […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[70,133],"tags":[644,8721,8728,8701,8702,641,12,7,643,642,6,8742,640],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-vdt","tag-appointments","tag-elections","tag-ethics","tag-georgia","tag-lake","tag-life","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-showing-up","tag-success","tag-valdosta","tag-vdt","tag-woody-allen"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-1Q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}