A thought on excellence

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been struggling with how to manage my time during this shelter-in-place adjustment. My family and I have been at home for a little over a month now as we do our best to social distance during the coronavirus pandemic. During this time, I’ve discovered that we get so stuck in how our lives operated when things were normal, that deviating from that in such a drastic way leaves us a little lost.

It’s been a challenge to manage both work and a toddler at home as my wife and I attempt to balance life and keep our sanity, not to mention my writing or the lack thereof. It’s a truly humbling experience and I recognize that we are fortunate as compared with many others who are struggling in even more extreme circumstances. It’s from that place that the desire to write this blog post came to life.

I recently listened to a pastor who spent some time talking about the life of Kobe Bryant after his death, and the sports stars quest for personal excellence. I’ve never been a fan or follower of Kobe Bryant, but I recognize the impact a successful black man has on the black community, and the subsequent loss of that man suddenly on people’s hearts and minds. The quest for excellence is something I can understand at a fundamental level as I have personally struggled with this desire in my own life.

I have striven to live a life of excellence in thought but now I realize not fully in action.

How I think and how I invest my time and energy are at odds and that’s a direct result of having wisdom but lacking something else, something critical. All the wisdom in the world cannot make you a better person. This is the story we get from Solomon’s life in the Bible. You can be widely renowned and respected but fail in the most critical areas of your life. I regularly watch this happen to CEOs, Executives and luminaries across the world, such profound contributions to their respective fields, but abject failures in their homes. The inverse is also true, with amazing fathers and mothers who never accomplish their dreams and blame it on life.

What is it that causes us to excel in one area but falter in others? Terms like work life balance get thrown around, painting the dream of the perfect life. Simply stopping and starting your day with hard limits gets painted as the picture of perfection and the key to a successful existence. But I realize now that there is something missing from that picture, something that is at the root of Excellence.

Discipline.

Discipline is a loaded term that can mean different things given the context. It’s easy for this term to be painted in a negative light, but I think there is something more to this, something positive in it that is key to success. Discipline is the glue that holds together our carefully laid plans and allows us to execute when things get hard. Without it, we are setting ourselves up for eventual failure. It’s important not to confuse discipline with perseverance as both have a part to play in the quest for excellence.

Excellence is a habit that we achieve through discipline and perseverance.

Doing the thing we don’t want to do, because it’s the thing that needs to be done is often touted as “being an adult.” But there is nothing easy about this. Recognizing and accepting that while making the decision to push forward is the first step to building discipline. When we start to lax in our discipline, it begins to boil over into other areas of our life and pulls us further away from the Excellence we desire. To start down the path of Excellence, we must not just desire it, but be willing to make the personal sacrifices to pursue it. We must discipline every aspect of our mind and body and align ourselves toward excellence.

I will be excellent because it’s the only way to accomplish what I need to accomplish in life. I need to be an excellent Husband, Father, Christian, Author and Technologist. The alternative is to have struggled so much and come so far only to come up short with only myself to blame. Life is struggle, and we will continue to struggle regardless of the path we take or the areas we invest our energy in. So why struggle for anything less than Excellence?