I’ve been working on a new book that goes a bit deeper into the meaning on excellence. A great expert, Dan Walter, the President & CEO of Performensation Consultingsent sent me this wonderful story. I think it tells the story of excellence beautifully…
DON’T ASK HOW HIGH, ALWAYS GO THE LIMIT
I sometimes wonder if this is the most important thing I have ever learned. When I was a fifteen I met a man who changed my life. He was a former sergeant in the Viet Nam war and was a tough guy who demanded excellence.
In one of my first practices with him he came up to me, got his face right into my own and growled in a low voice:” When I say jump, what do you say??”
Here is where I should mention that I was raised by parents who taught me to respect and listen to my teachers, while striving to be the best. I meekly, but confidently answered “How high?”.
I was shocked when he yelled out “You don’t ask me how high, you jump as high as you can and I’ll tell you if it was fling high enough.”
Needless to say, I didn’t understand the lesson the first time. I just thought the guy was a lunatic who in some way hated me. I spent more than three years working with this man and learned that, although he was at times a bit of a lunatic; he certainly did not hate me. He became one of my mentors and taught me that if a person always does something to the best of their ability, they will usually succeed and will never have to apologize for failing. There is no reason to feel bad about failing if you did everything within your talent and ability to achieve the goal. This is true whether you are an Olympic athlete who comes home without a medal or if you are asked to do something at work and you cannot complete the task successfully.
The key here is always doing everything as well as you can. If someone asks you to do something and you feel it is outside your capabilities, you may want to explain the possibility of failure right up front while at the same time making it clear that you will put everything you have into it. If you work your hardest at something and someone ends up better than you, congratulate them on their achievement. Too many times we determine what the expectations are and set our goal to the same level. This often true even when exceeding expectations would take very little, if any, additional effort.
Sometimes we forget that our glass needs to be more than half full, and that our own success depends on us moving forward. Instead of providing the best we can, we provide what is expected. Many of us don’t realize where the hollow feeling in what should be a goal achieved comes from. Usually is comes from us being dissatisfied with what we deliver because we know it can, and should, be better.
Do not undersell your life. Whether it is love, work or play, always go the limit. If you don’t know what people expect, you will never measure yourself to false limits. No one expected Bill Gates to one of the wealthiest, most successful businessmen in the world. No one expected Martin Luther King Jr. to change the world. No one expected Dr. Jonas Salk to discover a vaccine for Polio. No one expected Oprah Winfrey to become a force for changing the way the Americans read books. Because these people simply jumped as high as they could, they achieved results that even they could not have expected. They did not estimate their abilities based on the limits of others. You should decide what you want to do and do it as well as you can. If you need to, improve your skills so you can do your task even better.
Many people do things to the best of their abilities and are upset because the end result is not up to their own standard. Amazingly these same people often do very little to improve their skill sets. You must want something bad enough and be willing to do whatever it takes, if you truly want to reach your greatest heights. If you want to get a promotion you must do your job incredibly well. You must also be willing to learn new things and acquire to skills that, along with your experience and effort, will make you worthy of a promotion. If you want to run your own business, take classes in business management, accounting and other related topics. If you want to coach your kids’ baseball team, take the time to read up on how to work with kids and learn the best ways to teach the fundamentals. Approach improving your skills set with the same intensity as the rest of the project. Your skills combined with your effort will usually lead to success.
Excellence also takes skills of course, but I believe that if you have this basic desire to learn and set your own goals you’ll find the skills.
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