Excellence: No Excuses
Following on from my post last week on “good enough” not being good enough, I’ve been thinking more about excellence; what the word really means, what the reality of the word really is, and why it’s something that I feel strongly about.
Bottom line: there is never a legitimate reason for lack of excellence. There are only excuses. In my opinion, ‘excellence’ means doing the absolute best you can do, or giving the absolute best you can give, with what you already have at your disposal, whether that be talent, material, time or other resources.
What is good is good, and what is not good is not good. The problem is that we spend a lot of time trying to explain why something that is not good is good. We make compromises and concessions. We sacrifice standards. We fall in to that ‘good enough’ cycle, and then start legitimizing throwing money, people, or both at the problem to make things “better”.
I go back to my earlier statement. Excellence can be achieved with what you already have. It might take longer, require greater levels of creative thinking and application, and some harsh self-critiquing, but it can be done. I’d even argue that it should be done, to learn the habit of realizing full potential before adding money or hardware or people or whatever to the problem.
Twitpic.com is an excellent example of this. One guy in his apartment with nothing but an old server, an Internet connection, and some free time created an excellent web service that today ranks 141 in the world by Alexa. Sure, today TwitPic is a legitimate business with employees and server farms in data centers to handle the load that is demanded of it, but the website itself has changed very little. The level of excellence present in TwitPic’s service was established early, by one guy with some free time in his apartment with an old server and an Internet connection.
It’s my belief that lack of excellence is the symptom of more serious root causes; laziness, complacency, carelessness, lack of passion, lack of vision…the list could go on. If we’re serious about achieving high levels of excellence, we have to avoid those root causes. Replace lazy, complacent, careless people with hard working, passionate, detailed people. We have to demand more of ourselves, and then perform at levels that meet and exceed that demand. That can be done without extra money, extra people, or extra systems. All it takes is some determination and perseverance, and an absolute unwavering standard to except no excuses for a lack of excellence.
