You are more excellent than you are letting on. You cannot convince me there is no more excellence within you than what you produce. You just aren’t giving it everything you can, and my guess is you are aware of it.
Excellence is challenging, and even terrifying to the majority of people, and that keeps them holding steady at “normal”. Everybody will not become excellent, or it would no longer be excellent … it would just be average. People are not all equal, but we can each do much better.
As much as people say they want to uncover their excellence, they neglect it, and they run from it when they discover how hard it will be. The efforts required for producing excellence that stands out from the crowd is enough to scare away most people. Those people include the ones you compete with every day. If you want to take that as looking on the bright side, at least you can know they aren’t giving it their best, either. Oh, but what if they ever do?
Why do people neglect or fall short of excellence? I’m going to share some ideas in terms I believe you will find useful.
One of the world’s greatest thinkers, Albert Einstein said “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” I am a fan of Einstein, and I have enjoyed his works in the field of theoretical physics. As great as his works were, I don’t think he ever said anything more true or meaningful than this statement.
Try to think of the ways you see excellence being persecuted. I see it in corporate politics, where showing excellence can be looked down upon as it makes coworkers and the boss look less valuable. Going above and beyond often creates the opposite of the expected rewards, and can harm friendships, or even get a person fired from their job. This sounds insane, to me, but I see it all the time!
I often watch excellence being torn down in marketing plans, in schools, and even in families. We live in a society that rewards being average, and marginalizes excellence. The rewards for excellence are still many orders of magnitude greater than average, but accordingly far more challenging to achieve. You cannot deny this fact, but you can overcome it, if you are committed enough.
Applying Excellence to Marketing
I’m here to talk about marketing. To get marketing right … and that means creating an optimal return on investment … excellence is required. I said “optimal” … not “acceptable”, and there is a huge difference. The problem is that excellence comes with a higher level of commitment and/or a different time frame than most people in business are willing to reach for.
Claiming a “commitment to excellence” is little more than a buzz phrase to a lot of companies. Actually doing it is quite another matter. That is partially because most people and companies do not have enough faith in their own excellence to demonstrate it in their marketing. They are too busy watching and imitating others. Even in cases where they can see it in their future, there are other huge elements in the way, like fear, torment, and ego!
I believe that everybody has a higher degree of excellence waiting to be released, but I also believe that most will never use it. In reality, it is a fortunate truth that most people do not have all that it takes to be excellent. They have the basic recipe, but they also have huge fears of the associated persecution, and that breeds apathy and other traits that are unseemly and certainly not excellent. Most will give up and stop seeking excellence, and you can use that to your advantage, if and when you choose to. Yes, beyond simple ability alone, it is a conscious choice!
One of the greatest sacrifices is that you must make vows against mediocrity, and stop accepting less than excellence.
Persecution of Excellence Observed
I would not say these things if I did not have first-hand experience to demonstrate. Here’s a dramatically shortened story of others’ attempts to squelch excellence.
I was a pretty bright kid, but my school didn’t know what to do with that. I butted heads with the teachers all the way up to my 15th birthday. Just after I turned 15, I left school for the last time and started a new company. I worked very hard, against great odds, to enhance my business excellence and my credibility in marketing. By the time I was 25, I took an early retirement. That worked for a while.
A few years later, I met my wife and went back to work building another company. It was hard work, too. We invested every last dollar we had at our disposal in that company. The first couple years were filled with 100+ hour workweeks and scrutiny from every angle.
During those first couple years, Peggy’s parents hated me. They looked at me like a “dreamer” and they simply could not understand why I was still working so hard at my job as a CEO when it cost me more than it paid me. They wanted me to go get a job working for somebody else, the way they had done. They even passed that influence on to my wife, and she began to persecute me as well.
The company was an overwhelming exercise in excellence, and we eventually proved the value of that excellence. We finally got to collect massive paychecks, and some of the persecution subsided. I recall one day when my mother-in-law came to visit. It was after we had far exceeded the top one percentile of money earners, built an amazing new home, and my wife was driving out of our new driveway in a new $70,000 car with my mother-in-law to go shopping. I asked my wife to call me if she needed more than the $50,000 credit card in her purse. That was when my mother-in-law finally came around to say “I guess you’re not such a bad son-in-law after all, Mark.”
The truth was later evident that the only manifestation of excellence she understood had been the money-rewards. She never saw excellence before that. She never realized why I had worked so hard, or even that my work had anything to do with it. To this day, she has still never recognized that the sacrifices were to achieve excellence … and not average.
In 2009, we were hit very hard by the worldwide economic collapse, and the persecution resumed in full force, and from all angles. Knowing what I learned in years past, can you imagine my response? Let’s just put it this way … I am not in the pursuit of “average”, and I never will be.
Some people will always be incapable of achieving true excellence, and others will be incapable of recognizing it. If you let that stop you, then you will settle for average.
Is it worth the sacrifices to achieve excellence? My answer is an emphatic “Yes!” Of course, that is a personal choice that each of us must make.
What do you choose?
P.S. I want to share something that I can credit, in part, for the topic of this article. It is a blog post by Janet Callaway titled “10 Great Quotes that Explain Why“.
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