Quest for excellence, rather than success

Success or failure is an outcome of competition and measured by comparison with others. Excellence, on the other hand, is all about being the best you can be through maximisation of your capacity, skills and abilities. Competing against your own weaknesses or fully tapping into your own capacity is the answer.

By nature we have an intense desire to beat others to claim success, not necessarily to perform to the best of our abilities. We are all guilty of this. However, I believe that to be our best we must focus more on excellence and less on success. We must focus on being the best we can be and realise that our greatest competition is not someone else but ourselves.

Similarly when facing challenges in the business world, being aware that there is competition is relevant, but I believe that if employees performed to the best of their ability it would help them realise the maximum they could as a team.

In fact, I do not advocate on competing but focus on winning.

I have my team focusing on teamwork, mastering the fundamentals, daily improvement and the process that excellence requires. We have a choice as individuals, organisations and teams. We can focus on success and spend our life looking around to see how our competition is forming, or we can look straight ahead towards the vision of greatness we have for ourselves and our teams. We can look at competition as the standard or as an indicator of our progress towards our own standards.

We can chase success or we can embark on a quest for excellence and focus 100 percent of our energy to become our best and let success find us.

Ironically, when our goal is excellence the outcome and the by-product is often success.