Giving thanks in the face of loss – a counting of blessings while itemizing the reasons you have been beset by life’s nastiest and most devastating curveballs – always has struck me as a thinly veiled humble brag. A passive-aggressive ace thrown from a hand of twos and fives.
Yes. Life has dealt me these low pairs, but I’m thankful for this ace.
As my southern-born wife has taught me to respond, “Well, bless your heart.”
So on this Thanksgiving, as we recount blessings and sometimes catalog the ways we are triumphant over pain or betrayal or illness or chaos or death, I want to share what I’m genuinely thankful for: strength.
As I walked hospital halls in the weeks before my father’s death, one thought became my mantra: That’s what the strong is for, I don’t know where I first heard it; I’ve ascribed many of my one-liner guideposts to my father and grandfather, even though I’m pretty sure they never said them. But that line was my rod and staff.
That’s what the strong is for.
I’ve been lifting weights since I was 12 years old. An Irish build pretty much guaranteed that the rippling muscles Charles Atlas and Soloflex promised were not in the cards. I lift heavy and I lift often. I’m 175 pounds, just like I’ve been for most of my adult life, and that’s just how that’s going to be – but that’s not why I lift. I lift because you never know when strength is going to matter, maybe more than anything.
In business, it’s easy to be a leader when times are good. Leading an organization through recessions, secular changes, disruption, cost-cutting and layoffs, toxic personnel – up the ladder or down – calls on strength that isn’t showy or even externally noticeable. It’s what you trained for, whether you knew it or not.
That’s what the strong is for.
Reinventing your career? Putting kids through college? Dead furnace? Figuring out finances after an unexpected turn? Health and finance and family and career and storms and circumstance. All of it.
You don’t put in the work without knowing that someday, you’ll have to put the work to work. That’s the bargain we make, the bargain we keep.
I am thankful for strength this Thanksgiving. I am thankful to have role models who have shown me – more than they ever told me – how to be strong. To remember when the winds howl: That’s what the strong is for.