Earned vs. Given

-->The boss’s son gets the promotion.

The Grammy winner has a bad song played over and over on the radio.

The all star gets the charge call & the rookie gets the foul.

It’s a result of a culture feeling that we deserve certain things.

I put in my time, so now I deserve something in return. It doesn’t matter if I earned it or not.

I had coffee this morning with a friend who taught me the story behind the black belt in martial arts. Years ago, a young martial artist would be given one belt for their lifetime. It was white; the same as their uniform. As they grew and trained and fought, the white belt would begin to yellow. A more experienced fighter would then have a yellow belt compared to a novice’s white belt. If they stayed at it for years, and learned the lessons through training and competition, their belt would become increasingly darker and tattered as a badge of honour. Only a true life long learner of the martial arts would ever have a “black belt” Now it’s like swimming lessons. I passed last year so I guess I’m a black belt this year. We have 16 years olds claiming to masters simply because they were given bright new belts every year. Replacing what was once a natural fluid process of progression with easy “paint-by-number” kind of steps.

I think all too often we treat life this way. We feel that we always deserve more, deserve the next level. And if we complete steps A-B-C we get there. But more often than not, I think life was designed to be more fluid, a natural progression, only getting our ultimate reward towards the end.

We don’t need the boss to give us the promotion at work. We simply work our way to becoming the leader of others. People want to come to us as a resource because we’ve proven ourselves with years of success, failures and perseverance.

A real music lover doesn’t care what award you’ve won. They listen for skill on an instrument and passion in a song. Traits that only come with pure devotion to music, experimentation in genres and years of trial and error in songwriting.

As for the bad call in the basketball… well that’s just always going to happen to the Raptors. At least the made the play-offs.

I think it’s time we stopped looking for our next little reward, and became more OK with simply allowing life to reward us in due time.

Thanks for the coffee and the life lesson this morning my friend