Show Up

Business travel means airports. Hotels. Conference rooms. It’s a chain restaurant where the conversation doesn’t always click and the dinner sometimes feels like it might never end. And at the end of it, you’re in a hotel room, away from your family, wondering what your kids did today.

I’m not telling you this to scare you off. I’m telling you because everybody else has already scared themselves off — and that’s your opportunity.

Look around. The business world has collectively decided that everything can be done from behind a screen. Every meeting is a video call. Every relationship is maintained through Slack and email. Everyone is comfortable. And comfort, in business, is where competitive advantage goes to die.

Here’s what a video call gives you: thirty structured minutes. You hear what they want you to hear. You see what they want you to see. And when the call ends, you move on to the next one.

Here’s what showing up gives you: the ability to look someone in the eyes. To see how they carry themselves. How they treat the waiter. How they handle a curveball. How they operate when things aren’t scripted and sanitized. You get to feel a person — not just hear them. And they get to feel you.

The reason showing up works so well right now is precisely because so few people are willing to do it. A flight and a handshake puts you ahead of ninety percent of your competition who are sending Teams invites instead. You don’t even have to be great at it. You just have to be there.

Not every trip pays off. Sometimes the dinner is awkward. Sometimes you fly four hours for a single meeting that goes nowhere. But that’s the math: you’re getting at-bats. Sometimes you go down swinging. Sometimes you hit a grand slam. The upside dwarfs the downside. And those brutal moments? They make the wins that much sweeter.

I’m not going to pretend I love it. I’d rather be home most nights. I don’t like most people. But while everyone else is optimizing for comfort, I keep booking the flights. Because the thing that actually moves the needle isn’t another email or another call. It’s being in the room.

Show up.