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.
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