What It Takes To Be Excellent

Author: Sonali D'silva 

I have been giving a lot of deep thought to excellence and commitment recently. I have asked myself a few key questions - what makes people excellent at work? What stops them from being so? Why is it often so difficult to find excellence such that it fills your heart with joy and a special magic to just watch something meaningful done flawlessly?

Easy answer is, it takes a lot of effort and hard work to excel and not everyone is up to it, and we are at times plain lazy to excel. Easier to watch TV than read a book, for example. Then again, we must have seen plenty of folks over the years who are sloggers, let alone hard workers, and yet the magic of excellence is missing. So probably, I reached a simplistic conclusion to the conundrum & there is more to it.

At times I’ve heard that my salary doesn’t merit excellence. They want me to excel? Fine, pay me more and I will. Now that’s a disturbing one for me personally! The day we begin weighing our salary v/s the excellence we can bring to our work, know that we are in deep professional trouble. Truth be told, which self-respecting professional doesn’t want to be paid some more? Almost everyone does.  I can turn this argument on its head and propose a very different theory....frankly, no company can afford an exceptional professional if they tried paying them for all their worth. So one can say instead, let me not break my head on the pennies and crowns and just get on with why I stepped out of my home so many years ago to begin with to have a career. In the larger scheme of things, life has a way of leveling out rewards and punishments...what I craved for in one phase of my life became lack luster in the next and what I took for granted earlier is now a deep regret. So either ways, don’t sweat it too much.

Which brings me to another obstacle in the path to excellence - Losing sight of the forest for the trees. Which is to say, we might be sweating it too much. We don’t realize our career just got blindsided as we micromanaged and fretted endlessly about the here and now. There is a reason why it’s joyful to look in to the horizon and looking too hard and long at our immediate surroundings generally ends in disappointment. That we are nurturing and growing our career is not an organic thought. The more natural conclusion, thanks to the daily grind of coming and going from work, is that we have a job! Career is a cultivated mindset. We need to decide to have one; at least no company ever hired me on the promise of a career, I decided each time to opt for one nevertheless.

The daily routine of going to office each day, completing tiny tasks, finding the smaller pieces of the jigsaw and returning home to other pressing priorities is enough to lose sight (and on some days, lose our mind) that our job is driving a career. Fairly easy to forget that the task is part of the big exciting project and that without the smallest piece of the jigsaw, the big picture will remain incomplete. A job well done propels our career; big difference, but hard to spot for most of us. Jobs are not inspiring. Period. Careers are exhilarating. That’s why I come to work each day and want to keep coming all charged up every single day. I know I am crafting my career – every single day. What I do or don’t, for the better or for the worse, shapes the organization.

Then comes the slippery issue of willpower. Most professionals fail to excel not for lack of skills I feel, but because it is so hard to deeply commit and not settle.  Commitment is a muscle, so is willpower. Don’t use it, you lose it. Commitment in turn takes physical and mental energy. Not managing energy is the easiest way to lose willpower and therefore commitment. Tiredness is not the greatest springboard for excellence, it’s more a foundation for just getting stuff done, somehow. As we grow in our career, we need more energy than we need more skills. Protect your energy.

The more I think the more I feel convinced that excellence is not a soft issue to do with philosophical and elusive platitudes. It is not about a vague and dismissive conclusion that some have it and some don’t, and some are just plain lazy. Interestingly, IQ doesn’t have much to do with it either. Excellence is a hard skill that takes a lot of practice and deep commitment. It demands daily sharpening of an ability that we all have to go deep into a task, be agile, be alert, be timely, love details, deliver only the best and produce spectacular results with the same ingredients that might be enough for someone else to produce disappointing ones.

A dangerous trend is to find easy answers and scapegoats for lack of excellence. These reasons vary from the mundane like, ‘I don’t have the time, I am too busy’ to the more dicey ones, ‘I was waiting for something to happen or someone to do something, so I could be excellent - I kept waiting, therefore I am not’. Hmmm. Whom are we convincing is a debatable point, that requires another blog altogether :)

To end this one I can say – Excellence is not dependent on what we have at the beginning, it’s not even what we lack right now, it’s more of what we gather on the way and what we can turn it into so it no longer remains ordinary. There is a magic to ordinary because you touched it, that’s excellence. And others see it more clearly than we can imagine.

Excellence doesn’t ask for much, just an unwavering resolve to be diligent, ferocious tenacity, unstinted self-belief, deep commitment, a hunger to outdo ourselves and a pride in a job well done that is very personal and little to do with anyone or anything else. Excellence is personal. Others and us benefit from it is a happy by product.

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