Adjustments
Who are you comparing yourself to these days? Are you living by your own standards of success and excellence, or are you living with perpetual guilt for failing to achieve unrealistic goals?
For many of us, the tendency to measure ourselves against perfection and to expect nothing less than perfection becomes a haunting force in our lives. On the roller coaster of dejection, failure, exhaustion, and the occasional temporary win, we live a wild ride.
So, what’s the difference between excellence and perfection?
Expectations and grace. (Effort is assumed for both.)
Attempting to live by excellence clearly calls us to higher standards, practices, and successes. But, where perfection leaves no margin for error, the notion of excellence contains a quiet understanding of human frailty, a realistic acknowledgment of imperfection, and the need for grace to continue after the stumble.
Perfection knows nothing of grace. If you miss a day of exercise, indulge in sweets, miss a deadline, fall short of your goal, or experience any kind of lapse, the streak is over, the effort is a failure, perfection has been broken.
To be sure, the journey of excellence is not all “up and to the right” on the chart. When you experience setbacks or even the consequences of poor decisions, grace is there to get back up and carry on. Small steps in the right direction, sometimes getting knocked back, but sometimes enjoying leaps and bounds forward…that’s excellence.
Hard work, determination, and resilience are all inherent to excellence, but so is grace.
So today, we get up and carry on because we have work worth doing, people worth loving, and lives worth living.
Excellence is not an exception; it is a prevailing attitude.
-Colin Powell
