When One of Us Shines: What’s in Your Cup?

There’s a story going around about a monk teaching his students. He asks: if you bump into someone carrying a cup of coffee and it spills, why did the coffee spill? Most say, “Because he was bumped.” The monk says, no, the coffee spilled because coffee was in the cup. If water was in the cup, water would spill. If it were milk, milk would have spilled out. Soda? Soda.

The point: when life bumps into you, whatever’s inside of you is what comes out. If kindness is inside, kindness spills. If anger is inside, anger spills. When life gets hard and gives us a bump, what’s in us spills out, on ourselves, on our work, and on the people around us.

Pressure Isn’t the Teacher

We live in a world that worships pressure. We tell ourselves, our kids, and our teams that pressure makes diamonds, crank the heat, pile on expectations, force more, faster, harder. The Truth is: the wrong kind of pressure doesn’t teach, build skill, or grow character. It just reveals what’s already in the cup.

Where You Fill the Cup

Whether it’s softball or business, practice with intention is where performance is built. Practice is where you get to bump what’s inside, see what spills out, adjust, and go again. If the right result spills out, awesome, praise your standard and keep moving. If the wrong result spills out…laugh, reset to the standard, and try again.

In games, or in business, you don’t get the luxury of unlimited reps. You get one fly ball, one perfect pitch with the bases loaded, one shot at the client conversation. When the bump comes, you don’t rise to the moment, you fall to the level of what’s in the cup. That’s what spills out.

Challenge vs. Pressure

High performance comes from preparation, not from ramping up fear. Pressure’s role isn’t to scare you into more; it’s to remind you why you prepare. Knowing pressure will come should drive us to fill our cups ahead of time with skill, mindset, and confidence, so the right things spill out.

That’s why I use healthy, intentional challenge with my employees and my players. Challenge means aiming one notch higher than you are now. “More pressure” just piles the weight on and hopes you don’t crack. Proper challenge grows people. Overbearing pressure breaks them.

“When One of Us Shines, We All Shine”

On my daughter’s 14U softball team, we have a tradition when someone makes a great play, or achieves something they have been working on doing better.

The Coach yells: “When one of us shines…”
And the team yells back: “…we all shine!”

It’s not about one hero. Every bit of shine lifts the team. It builds connection, support, and trust. Shine comes from shared standards, shared effort, and the belief that we’ve got each other’s backs. I tell my players: “fill your cup with shine, set the standard, practice until it’s automatic, and show up so your shine spills out when your teammates need it most”.

Shine in the Cup (and Why It Doesn’t Always Spill)

Here’s the part most people miss: sometimes the shine is in your cup, but it doesn’t spill the way you wanted when you’re bumped. You strike out. You boot a grounder. You walk back from the box empty-handed. Then you hear your coach say, “Great job.” Why? Because we saw it. We saw the shine in your cup, the approach, the swing, the focus, even if the result didn’t land this time. And you know it, too. You know when the shine is there and just didn’t show and when you need more work so it will. Don’t confuse results with contents. Not everything inside spills perfectly on cue. But practice stacks the odds so what’s in the cup shows up more often.

Amateurs practice until they can do it right. Professionals practice until they can’t do it wrong.

Quality vs. Quantity

This applies to softball and business:

• Quality is intrinsic. It’s fueled by internal motivation and is a product of your standards.

• Quantity is extrinsic. It can be pushed with pressure, rewards, or consequences. It’s a product of labor.

You can force quantity, one more rep, one more call, one more sale. Pressure thrives on quantity. You cannot force quality. In fact, quality usually gets worse under pressure because quality lives in detail, care, pride, and standards.

When Loretta tracks a fly ball and makes the play, it’s because that’s what’s in her cup. I know because I watch her practice, she gives it everything on every chance. That tells me her standard is to catch the ball, not hope it works out. People wear their standards. You can see high standards in how someone works, speaks, dresses, and leads. You can also see lower standards. And here’s the kicker: you can’t pressure a person into higher standards, they have to own them.

When leaders, parents, or coaches try to enforce standards with pressure, people resist - actively, passively, emotionally, socially. Push hard enough and they don’t rise; they crack. I used to think pressure raised standards. I don’t anymore. Now I look for people who already want quality, and coach them to raise it even further.

Quality is a standard. Quantity is a scoreboard.

• Quantity thrives on pressure. The right kind of pressure. The pressure from the task or the game. Not some outside force, like parents, fans and coaches breathing down their necks.

• Quality thrives on standards, systems, structure, and support, and on learning to manage pressure when it shows up.

A Note to Parents, Coaches, and Leaders

We often think our job is to “tell the truth” about where someone sits on the quality spectrum. That rarely helps. Our real job is to believe out loud, to encourage them until they raise their standard. If you try to push a standard they haven’t chosen, you’ll create resistance and the standard won’t stick. People raise their standards when they (1) believe they can, and (2) see that higher standards give them the best shot at the results they want. Once they own the standard, you can watch them embody it.

The Business Parallel

Entrepreneurs and leaders, same game, different field.

• What’s in your cup?

• What are your people filling their cups with?

Are you building skills, clarity, and confidence, or just dumping pressure? You can motivate quantity with pressure: more calls, more reports, more output. But if you want quality - reputation, loyalty, innovation, durable results - you won’t get it by leaning on fear.

Your role isn’t to shatter resistance with pressure; it’s to teach pressure management and provide challenge + support so, when the customer blows up, the deal shifts, or the market bumps you, excellence spills out, because it’s already in the cup.

The Real Question

When life, or business, bumps into you, what spills out? And what are you helping the people you lead put in their cups? Shine doesn’t happen by accident. It comes from standards. From practice. From filling your cup with the right stuff day after day.

When one of us shines, we all shine.
And in business, when one person’s shine spills out, the whole company benefits.

Takeaways for Entrepreneurs

• Pressure fuels quantity, not quality. You can push for more output, but you can’t pressure people into excellence without doing internal damage.

• Quality comes from standards. High standards are owned internally, practiced daily, and lived until they can’t be missed.

• Your job is to fill cups, not just bump them. Build clarity, set challenges, and teach skills so when the bump comes, what spills out is excellence.