Owning Non-Excellence
Irony is best served cold. Yesterday, I talked about how the bar has never been lower. People and businesses are underperforming at an astronomical pace, and we've never seen such an opportunity to meet the market with excellence to excel (with our respective careers or businesses).
Then mere hours later, I performed a masterclass in non-excellence by letting three separate people down: a client, a blog reader, and a fellow board member. Three whiffs, three embarrassments, three regrets. Several factors played into my mistakes, including my new agonizing back injury and technical issues. However, while it would be easy for me to make excuses for these mistakes, there was one common theme in each of them: Me!
The truth is, it doesn't matter what caused the mistakes. The mistakes happened.....period. Passing the blame to some other reason, whether valid or not, doesn't undo the mistake. Therefore, it's my duty to take full responsibility for my non-excellence. There is no other path forward.
In an endeavor to be excellent, there will be non-excellence. It's just going to happen. But what are we going to do with it? Justify it? Excuse it? Blame others? Try to pretend it didn't happen? I hate all of those options. For me, the only reasonable and honoring option is to sincerely apologize, make it right, and endeavor to do better going forward.
That's the only path to excellence. Another way I try to think about it is I'm in the business of getting it right, not being right. If I'm wrong, my obligation to my clients, friends, and colleagues is to get it right; and getting it right starts with taking ownership of the non-excellence.
We must do this personally, and we must do it professionally. It hurts to look in the mirror and realize I'm 100% to blame for something (as I did three times yesterday). But it hurts worse going to bed at night knowing I tried to wiggle out of a mess caused by my own hands. I'll take that slice of humble pie every day of the week.
Today, I plan to be excellent. Will I accomplish it without fail? Probably not. But I'm going to give it my best shot. And WHEN I fall short, I'm going to sincerely apologize, make it right, and hopefully learn from it.
One percent better every day.
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