The dependable virtues: Hard work and punctuality

Cal Ripken was, to use a cliché phrase, baseball’s perennial “Iron Man”. A soft-spoken shortstop and third baseman from Havre de Grace, Maryland, Ripken played 2,632 consecutive games for the Baltimore Orioles between 1982 and 1998. He was a stellar player. Over the course of his career he hit 431 home runs on 3184 hits with a batting average of .271. He was a 19-time all-star; and, though he was no Babe Ruth or Roger Clemens, his achievements on the field would have placed him among the baseball elite even if he had missed one or two games a year. But instead, Ripken never missed a game. He always showed up. He always played hard. And MLB fans voted Ripken’s record-breaking 2131st consecutive game Major League Baseball’s “Most Memorable Moment” because it represented a heroic achievement in what Ripken is truly known for: dependability.

In college, I had one motto: work hard and show up on time. I didn’t always live that motto, and I still don’t. Somewhere short of Ripken-like consistency, I slept through a few classes and turned in the occasionally late paper. Now I show up late for dates and sometimes give less than my best effort in my writing endeavors (as you may have gathered from the frequency of my blog posts). But I generally give opportunities my best shot and make deadlines because I know that even if I’m not the smartest or most talented guy in the room, being a dependable person will open additional opportunities to me that even raw ability might not.

Almost all of us have observed this concept at work. Think of the respected people you know – whether they are construction workers or corporate lawyers. Are they late to meetings? Do you have to check in with them to make sure they are working hard? Do they ever stand up friends or shirk assignments? Almost invariably, the answer to all of these questions is no, because in all of their personal and professional relations, they have respect. They respect the time and resources of the people around them and the obligation their abilities and opportunities place on them to fulfill their own potential.

That is an aggressive series of statements, but I believe it’s true. When we are consistently late to meetings, dinner dates, or dentist appointments we are disrespecting those with whom we are supposed to meet. We are, in a sense, saying that our time is more important their time, and that they should operate not on the preordained deadlines on which we collectively agreed but on the capriciousness of our own personal schedules. This not only wastes their time, it creates a vicious cycle. Deadlines become permanently flexible, and all parties begin to ignore them. The efficiency of scheduling is lost because no one knows when someone else will waste his or her time, and each person begins to operate with disregard for other members of the group. Punctuality is how business people and friends get things done in a world of limited time, and perpetual lateness is an affront to that effort, apart from having negative implications for our honesty in agreeing to a meeting time in the first place.

Similarly, hard work is fundamentally an issue of respect. Just as punctuality is respectful of other people’s time, hard work is respectful of their resources. When someone offers me a paid job or the capital to start a business, they are, in a sense trusting me to make the best use of that job or capital and to take that responsibility seriously. They do not expect me to exceed my own abilities, but they do expect me to perform in accordance with my abilities by working hard. And by working hard and respecting the resources they have devoted to me I earn their trust – a trust that can lead me to additional responsibility and opportunity.

Also, hard work is respectful of one’s self. In this world, we’ve all been given talents, a social position, the benefits of family or some other endowment that confers on us opportunity. We earn that opportunity, by fully utilizing those endowments – by making the most of them – and that can only be done through hard work. That doesn’t mean we have to work all the time, vacations are evil, or leisure time is anathema. It just means that out of respect for ourselves and the opportunities we’ve been given, we should make the most of those opportunities within reasonable limits in justice to the fact that they have been given to us in the first place.

Cal Ripken was a good baseball player because of his unbelievable athletic talent, but he was great because unlike 99.9% of the human population he cared enough to make the most of his abilities. When the Orioles needed him, he was always there. In practice and on the field he seized each opportunity; and while he didn’t have the hand-eye coordination of Tony Gwynn or the raw power of Barry Bonds, he became legend because unlike anyone before or sense he extracted every ounce of good from his talents and did so in a way that respected, inspired, and assured his fans, coaches, and teammates. One day, I’d like to be known for that kind of dependability; but it will take a lot to get there.

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