 Last week I wrote: “Opportunity doesn’t just happen. It happens because it is provoked by excellence. It is the quality of our lives demonstrated by our work, our character and our attitude that brings a favorable opinion from others which incites them to offer us opportunities.”
What is excellence? It is the discipline of consistently performing towards the upper range of your talent and skill beyond accepted levels of mediocrity. From this truth, we understand three things about excellence: it is a discipline, it is consistency and it is to excel above mediocrity. Last week I explained excellence as a “discipline.” This week, we discover that excellence is “consistency.” Excellence is to consistently perform towards the upper range of your talent and skill. In other words, excellence pushes your limits; it stretches you. It forces you to do and be better. This is not to suggest that excellence requires perfection. Rather, excellence is about giving your best. Perfection, on the other hand, is about being flawless, it’s about delivering a faultless, perfect product. Excellence isn’t about the product, it’s about the performance. It’s not about winning, it’s about giving your absolute, best effort—performing towards the upper range of your skill. The reality is, one can play his or her best game, they can give their best effort, but still not have the best score; in fact, they could lose. So, excellence is not about first place, second place or even third place. Excellence is about work ethic. More important, it’s about consistent work ethic. Anyone can do their best once in a while, especially when someone is watching them. But true excellence is what happens in the dark, when there’s no spotlight and no one is watching. It is a sense of responsibility that obligates you to offer your absolute best effort in every situation regardless of who is watching, how much you are being paid or who is going to know about it. Excellence says, “It is up to me to put forth an effort that makes a difference, and if I do not perform at my absolute best, then I am responsible for the failure that results.” Check back next week for the third quality of excellence. Or, check out my new book, Upward: Taking Your Life to the Next Level now available on Kindle. Comments are closed.
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It was concerning King Saul that David said, “How the mighty have fallen, and the weapons of war perished.” His was a life that began with great promise and celebration, but ended in miserable failure and humiliation. His life is an example of how the mightiest of leaders fail.
Why do great men and women fall? How do leaders, quick to ascend with such promise of unparalleled success, find themselves awash in disastrous failure and disgrace? More importantly, can the path toward one’s downfall be discerned before it’s too late and be avoided? It is the premise of my newest book, How The Mighty Have Fallen that such a decline can be detected and reversed. The life and leadership career of King Saul, Israel's first king, provides us with a treasury of examples of "what not to do." The below blog post is the first in series of excerpts from the book to examine and avoid Saul's mistakes and find a successful path through leadership. READ AN EXCERPT |
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