Excellence is everywhere and it’s looking for a Home

Excellence, Scarcity and Exclusivity

We have a pervasive notion that excellence requires exclusivity. This probably comes from a time when opportunity really was scarce, and, as a result, did require some amount of exclusivity. We built not only institutions around that fact, but narratives. And after narratives, identities.

Today, access to opportunity is everywhere. Though it’s still far from being evenly distributed, so many people have access to being excellent, that the idea of it being exclusive— and more so, the constructed, institutionalized opportunities for cultivating and recognizing that excellence, vastly underrepresent those who are actually or possibly excellent.

One of the questions we try to explore at the Embassy SF is whether we can create an almost radically open community that still sets a high bar for excellence and ambition. People ask how we manage to maintain this “high bar,” or “choose only the best people,” and some even say they like the fact that it feels special; that they had to “apply” and that there was some mysterious process to that acceptance.

Opt-in Exclusivity, not Scarcity

The application process we have is actually about creating a new narrative around excellence.

Identify the conditions that make you excellent, and then surround yourself by people who will support and reinforce that. Be comfortable asking others to be excellent, and let them opt-in to that ask. At best, they’ll be inspired to Say Yes. At worst, they’re aware they can ask someone else to be excellent, in a way that’s more meaningful to them.

Believing you will find excellence in people requires taking some responsibility for finding it. When it comes to community building, my feeling and experience is that we all like to feel part of something, and holding the space for that “something” to be about excellence, is one of the simplest and most powerful things we can do. That’s the only, possibly special thing we do at the Embassy. “Possibly” special because, if it is, it shouldn’t be.

My old Crossfit gym is a great example of this. They set the bar high — like, make-you-cry-and-bleed type of high. This setting of the bar wasn’t for everyone, and some didn’t stick around. Moreover, not everyone who stayed actually met the bar that was set — most didn’t! But you can bet your money, though it was sometimes through gritted teeth and self-doubt, that we were able to do more pushups and pullups, and lift more weight, than we ever had at another gym.

That is to say, that in these times of (relative) opportunity and accessibility, creating scarcity around excellence is one of the worst social myths we continue to propagate. And while celebration is an important ceremony for human societies, it’s not for some finite group to achieve an arbitrary level of excellence as deemed by the Association of X funded by Y, but that each of us has a net positive delta from where we started — that the overall state of world is better than it was before.

That can only be achieved if we let go of the notion that excellence is scarce, and realize that it is as simple as asking it of people, and holding space for it to happen.