Excellence Isn’t What You Think

There’s a story you’re likely telling yourself about excellence and chances are it’s a lie. Excellence isn’t the satisfaction filled slam dunk you think it is. In fact, you’re guaranteed to never be excellence precisely as long as you believe it to be that way.

Excellence involves a remarkable performance. If we agree on that then there is a key assumption about the kinds of pursuits that have a chance to be “excellent”. By definition, they must be a stretch of our abilities. Excellent performers, then, invision a perfect effort as a target. They shoot for the target and most definitely experience some other reality than the one they imagined. In fact, there’s a greater chance that an excellent performer coincidentally replicates their vision exactly than they actually do what they set out to do. I’d bet Muhammad Ali never envisioned the perfect fight not landing punches. Yet, the greatest of all time threw thousands of punches that didn’t land. What we do know is that despite these shortcomings from perfection, Ali lived very close to perfection. He arguably lived much closer to perfection than anyone before him in the ring. It wasn’t perfection, nonetheless.

Excellence, by definition, includes deviations from perfection. Have you considered that failures, misses, and errors of all kinds can be included in your definition of excellence? Your heroes surely have.

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach