The Power of Showing Up

This past June, I was at Madison Square Garden watching the Knicks try to bury fifty-three years of bad history. Watching them fall behind by what felt like an insurmountable margin, my neighbors and I started quietly questioning the judgment that led us to pay a genuinely embarrassing amount for our tickets. Then, after a halftime show featuring Wu-Tang Clan and Method Man's now-famous “Knicks in 5” call, we started chipping away, shot by shot, until suddenly the entire arena was looking up at the scoreboard in total disbelief. By the time the final buzzer sounded, we'd witnessed one of the most improbable wins anyone had ever seen in the history of the sport.

I'm not the person to break down exactly how it happened. What I noticed instead was simpler: nobody in that building acted like the outcome was settled, long before there was any evidence it wasn't.

I've spent a lot of years around people who show up for chamber music in exactly that way, not because the outcome is guaranteed, but because showing up is the job, regardless of what the scoreboard says. Grant panels convened for artists who may never see this specific funding cycle pay off. Advocates walking congressional hallways for policy that might take years to move. Ensembles rehearsing repertoire that won't sell out a hall, because the music matters and someone has to keep insisting on that.

None of that is naive. It's a discipline. The people I respect most in this field aren't the ones who wait for certainty before committing. They're the ones who've decided that certainty was never really the price of admission.

I don't know exactly when I started thinking about leadership this way, but I know I haven't stopped since that night at the Garden. The next win in this field is rarely obvious in the moment. Somebody has to keep believing in it anyway, and keep showing up, long before there's a scoreboard that says they were right.