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THE THREE RESOLUTIONS

Tag Archives: excellence

Don’t Value Excellence (WHAT??) Read on…..

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Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Character and Competence

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"time management", character, competence, covey, excellence, GTD, leadership, meaning, peppa pig world, personal development, purpose, service, seven habits, Stephen R Covey", three resolutions, training, values

Assuming you have taken the time to identify your personal values/principles, let me take a punt at identifying two of them.

Family. See, told you I was clever. Okay, unless you’re living alone or are a complete psychopath there is a good chance you put Family on your list. The level of compliance with that value (over work, for example) is another question, but for another time.

The second on is Excellence. Was I right? Is excellence on your list of personal value statements, appropriately defined? Well, if I was – I recommend that you take it off.

That may seem an odd thing to suggest. You may feel that excellence as a value is an accurate reflection of what you believe to be a unifying truth. Well it is. And it was on my list of values for a long, long time. And then I removed it.

I removed it because excellence is a lovely target to have, but an impossible one to hit. Not always – sometimes you do something that you think is perfect, and sometimes you will be absolutely right.

But I know of no-one who is ever completely satisfied with an outcome that can be and is affected in any way at all by the actions or assessments of other people. Excellence is so easily defined as being somewhat parallel to perfection. And that target constantly changes.

I have written books, and both although and because my valuing of ‘excellence’ existed, I rewrote them all. Some needed routine legal/practice/digital updating but others just weren’t good enough – for me. And even when I was happy with it, and felt I had achieved excellence – someone else saw it and made some genuinely pertinent observation that made me wish ‘I’d thought of that’.

Which is a good example of showing that excellence is very often in the eye of the beholder, which means it is to some degree outside of your Circle of Influence. Well, certainly the smaller Circle of Control, anyway.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t aim for excellence. But if you’re going to make it a value, prepare to disappoint yourself. You will do that constantly.

What to do, instead? I suggest you consider valuing Effort. You know how much of yourself you put into any endeavour, and you know when you aren’t doing enough. Other people’s opinions and assessments can’t affect what you know you have done, and how well you tried to do it. If you value effort, you value the mental effort you take to learn the particular method for doing something, you know whether you sweated enough in terms of the physical effort, and you know whether you put the time (psychological effort) into the task.

You can also, then, make some allowance and forgive yourself when you did all you could and it still wasn’t enough. For example, when you make an error that costs you dearly. You may well have done an excellent job, but something or someone felt disappointed and the result was you lost out. But you know, at the very least, that you did the best you could with the resources you had.

You put in the Effort. Your integrity is sound, and you maintain your sense of dignity and personal self-esteem.

Which is excellent.

Review your value of ‘Excellence’ and redefine it to mean Effort. It is worth the, er, investment.

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Commit to Excellence. Goethe said so.

16 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Character and Competence

≈ Comments Off on Commit to Excellence. Goethe said so.

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"time management", covey, excellence, personal leadership, self leadership

The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavour.” Vince Lombardi

Unfortunately, excellence is often in the eye of the beholder.

That caveat doesn’t undermine Lombardi’s tenet. He spoke of commitment to excellence, to trying at all times to do the best one can, whatever one is doing in the moment. It means overcoming the temptation to go, “That’ll do” as a matter of routine (while acknowledging that time and other external influences occasionally means that what is done is all that can be done – quality sometimes has to wait).

Stephen Covey often paraphrased Goethe, who stated, “Commonplaceness, the surrender to the average, that good which is not bad but still the enemy of the best – That is our besetting danger.” Covey’s slightly more prosaic, simple version was “The enemy of the best is the good.”

For his own part, in his book, The Success Principles, Jack Canfield quotes some statistics to show how what might be considered ‘good’ was not so. One might be forgiven for thinking that 99% ‘perfection’ is a desirable achievement. He wrote of what would happen if we achieved that lofty goal in certain sectors. We would get:

  • 32,000 missing heart beats a year
  • 500 surgical mistakes a week
  • An hour of unsafe drinking water each month
  • 2 unsafe landings at major airports a day

Still, 99% is ‘good enough’, eh?

However, as I suggested, striving for 100% excellence IS enough. In acknowledging that perfection is elusive, we also recognise that what ‘I’ think is perfect may not be judged as highly by someone with greater knowledge, skill, experience or insight than me. (Or from someone who shows a propensity for criticism that is inversely proportional to his/her possession of any of those traits……) Those who criticise us objectively, based on their possession of those characteristics, are people we can learn from if we are prepared to listen.

All of the above provides us with two important lessons.

One: we should try for excellence but acknowledge that we still have much to learn.

Two: the same rules apply to those around us.

Which means that criticism of others’ actions, standards, behaviours and so on should be objectively assessed only by those who know better – not by those who just think they do (including me).

We should recognise that when someone in authority makes a decision, it is based on their knowledge, experience, skills and the data they possess. Which we may not. And we should also acknowledge that as the making of a decision implies the result of consideration of more than one option, the mere fact that they took a different option than we would does not make them stupid, or not good enough. It just means they made a different decision.

Provided what they are seeking is excellence, we should live and work with what has been decided. And then focus on our own commitment to excellence in doing so.

For more on Character and Self Leadership, go HERE and buy a copy of The Three Resolutions. (Or HERE for Kindle.)

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