Becoming Excellent
What I read: How to be excellent by Benjamin Studebaker. Published on May 5, 2021 in Psyche.
We all want to be excellent at something. At least I hope that’s true. I sure do. If you’re reading this, my guess is you’re someone who strives to be excellent, at one or many things.
As I read the article, it made me recall what is typically referred to as self-determination theory. That theory, devised initially by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan and elaborated upon and refined by many scholars and researchers around the world, is based on a widespread consensus among social psychologists that humans have three primary psychological needs. The gist of the theory proposes that every human being needs three things to achieve optimal happiness.
Autonomy
Competence
Relatedness
I will leave discussing autonomy and relatedness for another time perhaps, but I equate excellence with competence. The words have different definitions. Competence denotes having sufficient knowledge, judgment, or skill. Excellence means someone is very or eminently good. Degree aside, I think the two words are similar enough in meaning that we can consider Studebaker’s topic of attaining excellence identical to developing competence as foundational to personal fulfillment.
When I encounter people who appear to me to be quite happy, to the one they are typically deeply engaged with something for which they can be considered excellent or they are striving for such excellence. Musicians. Writers. Managers. Technologists. Nurses. Craftspeople. Cooks. Parents. Gardeners. Accountants. Scientists. The list of things at which one can be excellent is endless and its prominence in each person’s life unique to them.
The excellence mindset, as I like to refer to it, sets apart the happier from those who are simply going through the motions of life with no attempt to improve to become excellent at something. This also applies to being excellent as a human being in terms of character by embracing constant self-improvement through learning, introspection, and positive actions based on such self-discovery.
Lately I have studied the life and teachings of Aristotle, spawned by a friend who knows of my interest in philosophy suggesting I watch The Life of Aristotle, a simple documentary on the life of Aristotle by renowned classicist, Edith Hall. That led to me getting Hall’s book, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, that I will likely finish reading today or tomorrow. It’s quite good. I seem to be gobbling up anything I can find about Aristotle.
So, when I stumbled on this article that references Aristotle and his most influential teacher, Plato, it piqued my interest.
When discussing Aristotle’s views, developing good habits inevitably comes up. Aristotle believed much of life’s betterment was achieved by nurturing good habits. My own daily habits are reading, walking, writing, and meditation. By encouraging myself to stick to these habits every day I improve and my life becomes happier.
I’ve mentioned before that happiness is not a destination. Rather, it’s a side effect of a life well lived. Good habits help us create a personal environment in which happiness can naturally spring forth and thrive.
However, the dark side of habits is that if we fall prey to the perfection malady with which many of us struggle, the moment we miss the mark for a habit to which we have committed, or life throws us a curveball that derails a habit temporarily, we throw up our hands in exasperated failure. We wallow in that failure and it stops us from continuing the habit going forward. Not good.
Habits and good practices must never be held to such perfectionist standards. It is a surefire recipe for disaster. You will miss the gym occasionally. You will be behind on that paper due at school. You will forget to brush your teeth. You will fail, often.
We must develop a sense of overarching purpose for which the habit was adopted and consider the ups and downs of adherence as simply the normal course of the stream of actions that will eventually lead to excellence. Blips along the path are to be expected. They are unavoidable.
Studebaker astutely describes how Aristotle’s wise counsel regarding developing good habits must be seen through the lens of the primary reason behind the habit. Regarding the importance of maintaining forward-moving action in the face of occasional failures, Studebaker wisely writes…
…But the truly excellent student will neither abandon the habits outright nor stick to them dogmatically. This student sees the purpose behind the habits, but also sees how the habits can be improved.
This has been a difficult lesson for me to learn. Commit to an exercise program? Great. I miss one day of my week’s workouts and it might feel like such a personal failure that I stop exercising altogether for a while. Commit to learning how to develop a website? Great. The first time the site crashes or I encounter a technical hurdle I might leave the site to rest in its current state until I again muster some resolve. Read a dense book about a certain topic? Great. If upon reading the first chapter I sense I am in over my head, I might abandon the book entirely when I should really sit with it and work through it slowly and diligently.
Be kind to yourself when it comes to your habits. We do not become excellent by being perfect. No one ever has. No one. Get back in the saddle after being thrown.
As for the right kind of education to pursue your quest for excellence, there are so many options.
The right kind of education is essential. Don’t get discouraged if you’ve had trouble in educational environments that weren’t oriented around your craft.
As a mostly self-educated person, I know firsthand that there are a multitude of ways to learn. I talk about many of them in my book, The Art of Self-Education: How to Get a Quality Education for Personal and Professional Success Without Formal Schooling. While formal schooling is great if it fits your needs, there are so many ways to learn just about any topic area if you ferret out the abundance of resources available online and elsewhere.
Then of course there is the often subjective and nebulous attribution of excellence. When is someone to be considered excellent? What yardstick do we use to measure true excellence? Is excellence always an objective assessment or is it plagued by the subjectivity that sometimes attempts to pose as objectivity?
Plato did not think everyone was always going to be a good judge of excellence and I think it a wise perspective. Not everyone will understand you or what you’re doing. This reminds me of the quote attributed to Oliver Emberton, “If you’re not pissing someone off, you probably aren’t doing anything important.” Not quite the same thing, but it’s in the same ballpark.
Sometimes, other people will like what we’re doing, and sometimes they won’t. Plato thought that most people wouldn’t know what was excellent if it came right up and bopped them on the nose. For him, if everyone likes what you’re doing, that’s a good reason to think you might be doing the wrong thing.
I find this to be true. The banality of sameness that conformity to others’ expectations can elicit offers the comfort of acceptance, but it may not signal something that’s excellent.
Music is an example Studebaker uses to characterize how one should accept or not others’ criticisms and where Plato and Aristotle disagree on this subject. Plato tended to believe that only deeper philosophical thought could yield the most elevated forms of excellence. Aristotle disagreed.
The music most people believe to be good is just the music they find pleasurable, not the music that helps people discover the reality of oneness. If Plato were around today, he might say that too many pop stars sing about antagonistic relationships with former lovers, a relatable experience but one that reinforces self-other distinctions.
Scan any social media platform and you’ll see that commentary on what is good and bad music abounds. Armchair critics are everywhere. Plato espoused what I would today call an elitist or snobbish perspective. There is sometimes an assumption that the masses cannot possibly be honoring excellence in their embracing of something such as pop music. I happen to be a huge fan of a lot of pop music. I like all kinds of music. Aristotle echoes my own view that excellence resides in much that is popular: music, movies, books, art, and so on.
But for Aristotle, excellence is readily discoverable in the world around us, if we’re willing to slow down and look at it. This is not to say that excellence is whatever the majority of people understand it to be, but if large numbers of people think that something is excellent, then that’s a piece of information about what the Universe is driving at that we must at least take into account.
My hope is that people will be slower to criticize and quicker to praise and offer encouragement. I always use the example of Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 artwork, Fountain, to illustrate the subjectivity of excellence. It was a common urinal submitted as art and was dismissed. Since then the work has been regarded by art historians and theorists of the avant-garde as a major landmark moment in twentieth century art.
This reminds me of the quote by the Oscar-winning screenwriter, William Goldman, when he was alluding to the vagaries and subjectivity of the Hollywood movie system knowing what would work or not work in a film. He famously said, “Nobody knows anything.” I think that applies to so much in life.
Finally, I’ll comment on the article’s extoling for the need to continually learn and refine anything for which we want to be excellent. In my own corporate field of software development, if you stick to what you learned years ago, you’ll be left in the dust rather quickly. The same applies to most professions, avocations, hobbies, or areas of deep interest. You must set aside time to learn and practice if you want to maintain your excellence.
…Even Plato and Aristotle think that we must always return to contemplation to continue to refine our understanding of excellence, of the good and how it ought to be applied to our crafts. This means that our education cannot end. We can’t simply come to a point when we’re ready to act, to practise our craft, and go on doing it for the rest of our days. Instead, we need to oscillate between periods of acting and contemplating.
There’s a lot of other good stuff in the article, but I’ll let you read that for yourself.
I encourage you to strive for excellence in something that’s important to you or that sparks your deepest curiosities. As mentioned earlier, excellence (competence) is one of the keystones to happiness. Happiness may be simply a side effect of excellence, but it’s a damn good side effect.
Note: I don’t necessarily state this upfront in my posts, but generally if I’m linking to an article, book, video, or some other content, it means I consider it worth the time to consume. This might seem obvious, but I wanted to make that clear.