The Mentor | #42 | Excellence
Each month, I share 3 things I've read on skills, careers, and personal development.
“She brought so much love, energy, and cheerfulness to the work that she could not but succeed.” — Louisa May Alcott
Excellence is hard.
Excellence requires 5x as much preparation, starting over when something is headed in the wrong direction, re-working the same presentation again, extra stress, and more time than you budgeted. It’s hard.
You know what is easy: ‘good enough’, a few typos, ‘best efforts’, and ‘mostly accurate’.
The opportunity is that everyone notices when things are excellent. The issue is that everyone also notices when things are just ‘good enough’.
Excellence does not mean perfection. It just means having a standard that you will not sacrifice, even if it requires the pain of excellence.
Excellence stems from effort, intensity, and attitude. These are all available to anyone.
So, the only question is: what is the image you want to project?
1
My favorite Martin Luther King speech is the one about the street sweeper. The main message is that no matter what the task at hand, you can always distinguish yourself by how you do it.
2
Philip Seymour Hoffman once commented that good things inevitably transpire when you just focus on doing whatever you are doing, as well you can. That is seizing the opportunity.
3
The difference between excellence and ‘good enough’ is often just your level of focus. And, many things in our lives today are forces of distraction. It’s possible that the ability to focus becomes a powerful distinguishing feature.
Thanks for sharing this great advice!
My favorite part of it:
"Excellence does not mean perfection. It just means having a standard that you will not sacrifice, even if it requires the pain of excellence."
Very gripping article on focus. I had never heard this issue framed this way:
“...we now need an attention movement to reclaim our minds.”
Thanks for sharing, Rob!