Since I work around various artistic organizations, I run into the word "excellence" a lot. You often hear phrases like "seeking the highest levels of artistic excellence." Another example: I recently heard about a music school that was "nurturing excellence." And of course, a lot of business consultants and speakers talk about inspiring, achieving, and searching for excellence. This all sounds wonderful of course, but here is my question:
What the hell does that mean?
For example, when you talk about "artistic excellence," are you referring to precision of intonation? (For non-musicians: that means playing really, really, really in tune, which, in a purely technical sense, is largely impossible.*) Does it refer to rhythmic precision? (For both musicians and non-musicians, this is also somewhat nonsensical, as variations in the core mechanical beat are what make a performance of a piece of music unique and magical.)
I don’t know, maybe it refers to everyone having their tuxedos cleaned prior to the show.
In the business realm, does this refer to the delivery trucks being really clean? Or does excellence in business mean making more money? Or is it defined as an essential step to doing so? And if it is defined by something other than actual numbers, who defines what that standard of excellence is?
I must confess, I’m a bit of stickler when it comes to issues of semantics. It’s part of how I pursue "excellence" in my writing. So I feel compelled to dig into this.
The trouble with the word "excellence" is that it is essentially a statement of opinion of what someone else does. You would never say "I am excellent." That would be thought conceited and rude. So everything has to go at an angle; when people talk about "excellence," they are rarely if ever referring to their own work. It’s almost always in reference to the work someone else is doing that they are either managing or selling. And no one really wants to argue about it, because a) there are no real standards for it and b) it sounds so gosh darn wonderful. It becomes a vague institutional goal, and it is used to justify all sorts of ridiculousness. (I could tell you stories . . .)
I actually have a little bit of an issue with excellence being a goal. If your goal is to be excellent, when and where do you do the "non-excellent" stuff, like failing and experimenting and mistake-making, that is so essential to doing something truly new and innovative? (Blatant commercial insertion here: this is one reason why I wrote my book, Principles of Applied Stupidity–to free you from the belief that you have to be excellent all the time.)
At the heart of this, I think, is a universal, and extremely well intended, urgent desire to work towards a higher collective goal that is beyond, or least is just a little better than, the average day-to-day grind. We all need to believe in such things. Whenever I contribute to a nonprofit organization, I really like to think that they are off doing wonderful grand important works, like saving whales or little baby seals . . . which, by the way, are also things that I just don’t have the time to do myself today. And "being excellent" certainly sounds like a fine and noble thing to go and do . . . that is, as long as I don’t have to actually do any of it myself, as it does sound like a lot of extra work, for not a whole lot more money.
However, on the flip side, the oh so common invocation of the grand idea of all this seeking of "excellence" smells a little funny. To suspicious cynical small-minded people like myself, too much emphasis on something so wonderfully grand and far off sounds like an attempt to counterbalance (or conceal) a feeling of being ashamed of what you actually are. I call this "toxic idealism." Excellence is a wonderful concept, but there’s an awful lot to be said for just doing the best that you can here and now, and being happy with that. Is that excellent?
I guess it’s all a matter of opinion, now isn’t it?
Well now you must excuse me, on top of everything else I have to do today, I also have to go search for and nurture some excellence.
©Justin Locke
*For more info see "Systems for the twelve-note chromatic scale" in this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_tuning
