7 Principles
For Achieving Excellence
What is the structure of achieving excellence, the architecture of principles that can create an exemplary life? What do you have to do to experience self-expression, fulfillment, and purpose? What do you have to do to increase your level of satisfaction and your level of contribution? How do you avoid the common fate of mediocrity? How can you break free from the apathy that appears prevalent everywhere? While, of course, these open-ended questions, and others along the same theme, can be answered in a wide variety of ways, based on different perspectives, here are 7 key principles to consider. They will help you create a structure for achieving excellence in your own life.
Achieving Excellence Principle #1:
Know Your Strengths
Play to your strengths, play to your sense of purpose. Through introspection, reviewing your interests and best performances, you can identify what you do best. When you work in alignment with what you love to do and what you do best, your chances of success improve exponentially. While this, of course, is all common sense, in reality, few people spend the time to identify their core strengths and fewer still do work that expresses these strengths. If you’re looking for your own elusive renaissance, this is the place to start. The existential whiplash of failing to know yourself is a life full of frustration, compensatory addictions, and self-doubt. It can even be a destructive life, because the frustration of unfulfilled desires will explode in irrational ways.
Achieving Excellence Principle #2:
Create A SMART Goal
A SMART goal is in a sense an objective goal. It is something that anyone can look at and consider specific, measurable, accountable, realistic, and time-bound.Specific--anyone can understand it because it is exact, almost mathematical in its precision. Measurable--anyone can look at what progress you’ve made at any time in your journey because you’ve designed a metric to assess gains. Accountable--anyone can look at what you’ve been doing on a daily basis. Realistic--anyone can relate to the possibility of it happening. Time-bound--anyone can see a clear start and end point. The best examples for SMART goals are found in sports. In sports, a good coach can tell exactly where you’re going, what you’re doing to get there, and how soon you’ll achieve your goal. Of course, a SMART goal does not guarantee success the first time, but even if you miss the deadline, you can always create a new deadline. While the exact opportunity may not happen again, similar opportunities will arise in the future. Naturally, without a goal, you have no sense of direction. While no goal at all is a sure way to fail, a vague goal, one that is ill-defined and that has few markers, will result in vague achievements. Still, many people are afraid to set goals. It’s a commitment. They believe by declaring an intention, not achieving it is a clear signal that they have failed. Yet, upon closer inspection, this is entertaining an absurdity, because as teleological beings, we need to feel the satisfaction of setting intentions and achieving them. The opposite of an intentional life is an accidental life, where nothing much happens, time is squandered, and few talents blossom. A life that has no purpose is no life at all; it’s a denial of the courage to live full-out. In essence, it’s a life of mediocrity, boredom, and dissipation. “The happiness of an axe,” said Aristotle, “is to cut wood.” What dream expresses you?
Achieving Excellence Principle #3:
Create A Provisional Plan
Once you’ve set your goal, you need to take action, massive, consistent, and relentless action. The way you do it is by assembling all known possibilities and creating a plan of action. This plan, of course, is never complete. It will be adjusted, possibly even completely upgraded, as you learn more about how to work on fulfilling your goal.The future, as always, is uncertain. Thus, your plans will shift, but setting a plan, like holding up a compass and relating it to a map, gives you a sense of direction. Refine your plan as you go along. Set tasks each day that move your plan forward.
Achieving Excellence Principle #4:
Celebrate Small Wins
As you take action on your plan, as you move toward your goal, you’ll enjoy small victories, nothing spectacular in themselves, but clear markers that you are well on your way to achievement. These markers are priceless because they encourage you to stay the course. Often people fail to even notice or appreciate these markers. Over time, when they believe that their major goal has not yet happened, they simply give up, oblivious of all the initiative they’ve shown, all the talents they’ve honed, all the resources they’ve gathered. Keeping track of your small wins over time will give you momentum to achieve your main goal. In addition, you should look on your main achievement not as an independent event, but the accumulation of small wins. Moreover, when you encounter failures and setbacks, recalling your small wins will give you the courage to persist.
Achieving Excellence Principle #5:
Embrace Discipline
Discipline is excellence. Discipline is the essence of your quest for success. An undisciplined life, rife with whimsy, sloth, random events, self-doubt, and confusion, is a life of perpetual dissipation. It is a life of lack and limitation, scarcity and insecurity, frustration and negativity. Discipline is structured action on a regular basis, action that will fulfill a task in your plan, action that will eventually culminate in the full realization of your goal.
Achieving Excellence Principle #6:
Study And Practice
Knowledge is an expanding force. The more you experience movement toward your goal, the more knowledge will show up on how to achieve it. While this knowledge will show up as a matter of course, your intention setting the train of synchronicity, you can accelerate it by consciously adopting a formal research and study plan. As your knowledge grows, you can practice it to accelerate your success, thus creating a positive loop between study and practice.
Achieving Excellence Principle #7:
Design An Internal Environment
Nothing is as destructive in achieving a goal as the subtle influence of other people.Achieving excellence only happens when you can outwork everyone around you. Yet the minute you begin doing this, you’ll meet with many people who will caution you to stop “overdoing” it. In creating your goal, you will find yourself, often enough, quite alone. Over time, the apathy, inertia, and even hostility of other people will discourage you. This is subtle. Sometimes people don’t have to say a word to discourage you. The energetic emanations of people who don’t share your will and initiative will slowly sap your strength. Since this whole aspect of undermining excellence is subtle, it is not noticed until after you have given up on their dream. Looking back you see that you did not persist simply because nobody supported you emotionally. Sometimes you may have been emotionally shut down because after some initial encouragement, your supporters lost interest. Sometimes you may have been emotionally shut down because they resented your level of enthusiasm, as it exposed their lack of initiative in their own lives. And sometimes you may have been emotionally shut down because your vision exceeded what most people could comprehend. Whatever the reason, the real reason you may have quit is that you relied on other people to supply you with the emotional fuel that you needed. This lack of an encouraging environment, more than other reason, is why we live in a world with so few giants. Those who did become giants often evolved because of a rich network of support; as members of a team, they found their own levels of enthusiasm, creativity, and discipline lifted by the collective will. However, to be a giant among giants, you have to be a self-motivating machine. Yes, a coach, a mentor, a team can and will help you to reach higher than you would have before, but even here, you must be willing to work harder, longer, and with more ferocity than anyone else around you. This attitude is the core of excellence, the singular current running through your will, that will make the difference between an exceptional life and a life that is average. This last principle is the hardest to achieve because we are all subject to fickle moods, to overwhelming fatigue, to unexpected setbacks. Add to this, the weight of other people’s subtle psychic influence, and you can see why so many people in the wrong company fail to achieve anything remarkable with their lives.
The Foundation For Achieving Excellence
These 7 principles, if followed, will create the foundation for excellence. They will take you to the place you know you belong: in the realm of giants. While these principles are easy enough to apply, their real merit comes in their application. It is only then that you can form an intimate understanding of what is called for in achieving excellence. When you play to your strengths, play to your sense of purpose, you make impossible things possible. Once you find your dream you find not only your own renaissance but a cultural one, too. The solitary artist in his studio, the solitary writer in his study, and the solitary scientist in his laboratory are adding to the rich dimensions of possibility for everyone. They are adding new dimensions of creative intelligence to the collective consciousness of the whole human race.
Return from Achieving Excellence to Success In Life
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