The more I seek it, the more places I seem to find it. I watch documentaries about sushi chefs and sneaker designers and Buddhist nuns engaged in their respective pursuits with remarkable focus and attention. I read beautifully crafted essays and watch live jazz performances that make me feel as if the creators packaged their souls into their work. I speak with my best friends and family members, watching their faces light up as they mention their hobbies — dancing, rock climbing, novel writing — with great fervor.
I see these things and wonder, how can I cultivate that much dedication and enthusiasm for what I do? How can I produce something that moving and beautiful? I’ve had many jobs, hobbies, and pursuits over the years, but none of them seemed to “stick” with me the way it had for others. Only now do I realize that I was looking for the wrong thing.
Over the years, working in fast-paced startup environments has eroded my perfectionism. In this KPI-driven world, everything is measured by output, which is evaluated as often by its quantity as by its quality. While I still believe that perfect is the enemy of done and that the pursuit of perfection can be overdone, I neglect to think about how execution can also be overdone, especially if the execution is not thoughtful.
As a result of my feverish need to maximize output in my work, and possibly my life, I’ve lost the care and attention I put into things. I’m not sure where it started, but as this carelessness consumes one activity, it bleeds into every other until I begin living my whole life in a careless fashion. Soon, every aspect of my life, from my cooking to my clothing to how I spend my free time becomes rushed and mediocre, making it ever harder to become inspired. It’s not until those quiet, meditative moments when I close my laptop or put down my pen that I stop and wonder whether all of my work is coming to a meaningful conclusion.
I often wonder, what areas of my life do I neglect in my effort to execute at all costs? Am I a wise consumer? Do I choose work, food, products, movies, music, environments, and hobbies that bring me joy? Are the people I surround myself with themselves deliberate in their actions? Am I as excellent when I brush my teeth as when I deliver a presentation? My stomach turns at the probable answers to these questions.
Instead of excellence, I focus on success. I see success everywhere, and it looks shiny and happy, and I think, “That looks nice. That should be me.” Success is effortless and seductive, like a well-composed Instagram shot or a glossy magazine cover. With so many books, articles, courses, formulas, habits, and hacks teaching me how to be “successful,” not striving for success seems counter-cultural.
On the other hand, success is slippery, because not only is its definition inherently different for every person, it is also infused with notions of the goals we ought to set for ourselves, often for money or recognition, which can be easily conflated with the goals that we actually want to achieve.
Scarier still, we may have supplanted our own desires for so long with societal expectations, with the examples of success that we’ve seen, that we have lost touch with what we wanted in the first place.
Success was the reason I left my first job in a huff. I was frustrated with my company because we provided a service that, while valuable and impactful, was an inherently difficult way to make profit. I knew that the way we were running the company would keep it small, and I wanted it to grow. I assumed that the founders should have wanted the same, and wrote them off for not sharing my vision, arguing with them periodically until finally putting in my notice. Only recently, with considerable distance from that environment, could I appreciate what the team wanted to do: make a positive impact, the size of which would grow organically, and no faster.
Which makes me wonder, is excellence only valuable because it is rare, or because it is difficult to scale? And if the pursuit of excellence were pervasive, would this mean that everything becomes excellent, or merely that everyone’s standards rise?
This ambiguity is what scares me the most about excellence. Success has metrics, there’s a yardstick, there’s positive reinforcement, followers, and profits. Excellence is a journey into darkness.
Its subjective nature means you can never say you’ve “made it.” You can never be satisfied. You can never bask in your glory. You must always push yourself to the next level of mastery, because the path is endless. For this reason, I equate excellence with spending years toiling away in a dark basement for little to no reward.
This thought instills fear, because it also means potentially alienating myself from a world that doesn’t understand my fanatical devotion to one small part of it. This world is governed by likes and shares, and excellence doesn’t seem meaningful unless it’s recognized. These days, If a tree falls in an empty forest, it definitely doesn’t make a sound.
I’m also worried about pursuing excellence because it does not guarantee success. The more I observe of the world, the more firmly I believe that success and excellence are independent of each other. They sometimes go together, but having one is no guarantee of the other. Plenty of people have achieved fortune and fame living far-from-excellent lives, and more than enough are living their best lives with little to show for it.
Perhaps this is why so many have debunked the myth of “do what you love and success will follow.” However, I’m afraid some see this as a reason to not do what they love at all, perhaps thinking instead that enjoyment will follow the sole pursuit of success. However, if the marker for success keeps moving ten yards forward, or is based on a flimsy notion of what you should want, this will never happen.
Perhaps the confusion comes from a conflation of success with fulfillment through work. “Did I achieve what I set out to do?” is a fundamentally different question than, “Do I feel fulfilled by what I do?” The former concerns only the end goal, while the latter takes every moment of the process into account.
Divorcing myself from my expectations makes excellence more freeing than success. No one else has to understand my work or approve of it. Success relies on a formula. With excellence, I get to experiment. Success means that avoiding failure is paramount. With excellence, I can show my work to total strangers and watch them rip it apart in front of me, and thank them because I care that much about making it better.
So then why are few of us willing go down the path to excellence, to put our best feet forward in every aspect of our lives? I don’t think it’s because it’s hard. We’re used to hard work. I don’t think it’s for lack of an incentive.
I think it’s because my ego wants to stay on the success track. It’s safer, more predictable, and results in feel-good feedback. It’s this same ego that forces me to stop and give up when I should keep going, the one that tells me my work will always be shit, that I’m wasting my time.
Excellence takes my ego out of the equation. It means divorcing my output, my salary, and my followers from my self-worth. It means pursuing an activity for its own sake, deriving my happiness not from the result of my work but from the work itself.
But the natural follow-up question is, how do I go about living an excellent life? I think having a craft I can take pride in is a good way to start. In my case this is writing, but it could be anything from speed-walking to dollhouse-making to beer-brewing.
A craft doesn’t have to be pursued full-time. Those passionate enough are content to squeeze their craft into any nook and cranny that it will fit. In fact, it may be easier to pursue a craft on the side, because failure carries less pressure, and I’m not financially dependent on it. In any case, it’s better to start the pursuit of excellence part-time, working it into my life little by little, than not at all.
Hopefully, from the patience developed by my craft, excellence will then spread into every other area of my life. I will naturally stop doing things that hinder the craft and enhance things that support it. Soon, putting care and patience into everything that I do will become natural, the choices I make will become easier, and my life will improve. My hope is that bringing a Zen-like focus to every area of my life, not just writing, will make me healthier, give me more energy, reduce negative influences, and inspire me to do even better.
The thing is, I’m not willing to totally abandon success, and I don’t think I should either. It’s normal to set goals, to make money from a passion or endeavor to share it with the world. And there are enough companies and individuals that have achieved success by striving to be the best in the world at something that I know it is possible to have both.
But I know that I cannot tie my happiness or self-worth to it. I must see my work as worthwhile, regardless of the outcome.
It’s fair to want to strive for both success and excellence, to have goals and master what I do, but only one can be my north star. Because if there is a goal I want to achieve no matter what, I will naturally do what it takes to get there in the shortest time with the least amount of effort. At some point, the two aims will diverge, and I will have to choose which matters more.
Choosing excellence as my top priority doesn’t feel particularly easy or rewarding, but it feels right to me. Because I know that even if no one reads these words, I am a truer, better version of myself for having written them.
