Excellence

Excellence isn't about becoming the best. It's not perfection. It's not flawlessness. It's not prestige or eminence. It's not a lot of things.

Excellence is about becoming better, and the continuous effort at always striving to become better at what you do. Excellence could be greatness and brilliance. It's about having merit and some sort of transcendence. It's high quality and high on integrity, sophistication, mental or physical strength, power. It's significant substance, and let's not forget dignity. And purpose.

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” ― Aristotle

Do it right the first time, if you can.

Become Excellent: Pick One Thing

You don't get to be excellent at many things. They say nothing is impossible, but well. It might just be.

Pick a few, or just one, and become excellent at those.

“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life.” ― Steve Jobs

Excellence In Not Perfection

Excellence and perfection are two distinct phenomena.

Excellent is something you can become, something you do. However. Becoming perfect is unattainable.

There's a divergence between the moronic perfectionism and the chase for the perfect. You may aim for perfection, although you will never reach it. If you insist on doing anything perfect, that's perfectionism, and that's just stupid. Excellence is related to the drive to always become better, because there is always room for improvement. Now, doing the right thing isn't perfectionism, but rather, the act or pursuit of excellence. Being excellent is like, being great, awesome, and better at the thing than most people, perhaps even best in the world. If you get to participate in the Olympics you're kinda excellent, and if you reach podium-levels you're even more excellent, the winner being the most excellent, but the record-holder is the most excellent. Yet, none of these are perfect, they're just excellent. Excellence is a process, and there is no peak, no best. While for perfect, that's another thing completely, when it's perfect it means it literally can't get any better. A perfect score might be possible, but that's just definitions, anything beyond X is defined as great, good, decent, perfect, whatever, and we'll give it a 10. Even though the internal range of 10 consists of everything from good to great to perfect.

Becoming excellent at one thing, does not mean you will have to suck at all other things. You're exceptional great at one thing, but that thing is composed of many smaller things. If you're an excellent CEO, you'll need many skills.

Excellence is about habits and what you do with your time; how you think and act.

Doing the things everybody else does, makes you ordinary. Nothing wrong with that, if you don't strive for excellence. You'll live an ordinary life, mediocre is probably better than anything below mediocre. The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is just four letters, e, x, t, r, and a. Oh wait, that's five letters. Scramble these letters, and what do you get? That's right. You get: "a t-Rex". That is something extraordinary.

Take the leap from being ordinary to extraordinary. How? Do something extra.

Be extraordinary. Do you want to live an outstanding life, do amazing things, enjoy a curious mindset, create exceptional things, be fantastic, build an incredible business, travel to marvelous destinations, cook phenomenal foods, have remarkable friends, achieve something unprecedented, something previously thought of as unimaginable or even impossible?

Be ordinary. Live an average life, whatever that means, do the common things that everyone does, in conventional and the expected manners. Just be the familiar and general type, indifferent to excellence, perhaps even a bit inferior. Nothing wrong about being normal, but as individuals we are all unique, and there is something more to us than being just ordinary. Perhaps there is something terribly wrong about being normal. The plain old ways, the regular 9-to-5 and having the same standards as everyone else. Would you rather be excellent, or at least strive for this goal, or would be satisfied with being unexceptional. Go ahead and enjoy your unremarkable life, most people do this and they are still happy. Nothing wrong with that. Or perhaps it is?

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
― Albert Einstein

Poops and farts. There are those people who will try to ridicule your ambitions. Those who themselves have few or none. They might be gaslighting idiots with an inferiority complex, envious or just stupid. Don't let the voices and signals of such imbeciles get to you. They are the inferior ones. This is what they do. Excellent people will not do this. Truly excellent people will, in their own unique way, make you feel excellent too; they will inspire the strive for excellence in others.

Excellence In Real Life

Excellence is something rare, by definition. It cannot be ordinary. It must be extraordinary.

Local domain excellence. The howler monkey of Central and South America has one excellent communication skill: It can produce sounds peaking at 140 decibels, making it the loudest animal in the world. By the way, 140 decibels is also considered the level for threshold of pain. But when juxtaposing two distinct male howler monkeys, there will probably be insignificant variation in sound-producing capabilities. These extraordinary creatures just became a little less extraordinary. One monkey might peak at 138 decibels, the other at 139, but you would not be able to make the distinction. There's nothing exceptional about those two monkeys, as every howler monkey could produce similar loud sounds, it's their innate ability. Now imagine a human doing the same thing, without any cheating, no aids, no technology; That would have been outlahdish-ish exceptional. Even 132 decibels would be unheard of for any human, that's comparable to the loudest sounds made by the kakapo, which is the loudest bird on the planet. Imagine there's a record of the loudest sound ever made by any howler monkey. Perhaps it was somewhere between 150 and 160 decibels, which is at the levels where human ear drums will rupture. Now that would have been extraordinary. But that's nothing in comparison to the loudest sound created by human technology, which is said to be the atomic bomb blasts over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, clocking in at 250. Yet, a sound wave does not become lethal until it reaches 310 decibels. There are a couple of events that might have produced such loud sounds: The 1883 eruption from the volcano Krakatoa and the 1908 Tunguska Meteor, the sounds itself would be enough to kill a human. In fact, it is said that over 3000 natives were killed by the shock wave of the Krakatoa event. That's exceptionally loud. But that's not excellence. Major digression.

Global excellence or universal excellence. Meaning it's the most excellent feat achieved by anyone alive, or even anyone, ever.

Great Moments of Life

Be great in the moment. Greatness does not happen over night. At least that's what some people claim. But there is an opposing viewpoint, and that is that greatness and excellence happens in the moment. Right now, you can be excellent. It's not about the end result, but the things you do here and now. And these things will accumulate. If you are excellent in the moment, there will probably be some excellent results too. But you never know. The journey is the goal, and the destination you initially had in mind might never be reached. Because life, or just because. Things don't always go according to plan. Plans fail. You could be excellent in the future, but that's not a given. You could be excellent, right now, starting, well, right now.

Be great from moment to moment. And make it consistent. If you can manage to be consistently excellent, you could expect excellent results too. But don't live for the results. Results are not in your control. You interact with the world through your thoughts and actions; You do not control the world; Conversely, You do not control results. Hang on for the ride, make the most of it. Ultimately life is one long ride, make it an excellent one from moment to moment. The journey ends when life ends, and if the end of the ride is the destination, then why do people keep obsessing over this thing, the destination, it's really not about the destination, it's about the ride.

A great life is nothing more than having great experiences. For some, this could mean having a life consisting of a chain of great experiences. For others, it could be having just a few magnificent experiences or doing just one exceptional thing. It doesn't have to be a chain of greatness. And what's this thing about having people imagine their final hour, and thinking about what their regrets would be, or how they wish they'd lead their lives. It's nonsensical. You don't know your future self. Stop pretending you do. Have you had a great life so far? Have you done something out of the ordinary? Have you been extraordinary in anything? Be the judge. Others does not get to define what excellent means to you; Your definition of excellence is the correct one, for you. You've led a great life so far if this is what you believe, no matter what other people think. And if you haven't, why haven't you? This life is all you've got. There is no justice in nature, equal opportunity is at best an illusion. The cards have been dealt, dice will be thrown, but in the game of life you're the player. Make the best of it.

High Standards

Because low standards sucks. Raise your standards.