Excellence Bit by Bit

I was in conversation with some of my friends during week end and someone talked about this urdu poem 

"Khudi ko kar buland itna, ke har takdeer se pehlay
Khuda bande se khud puche, bata teri raza kiya hai"

There are various interpretations to this beautiful poem and a different note stuck me when I was interpreting this in the backdrop of excellence. It can be interpreted as, you take your level of excellence to such a level that Khuda, who is supposed to be the epitome of excellence, will take your permission to do his work.  This again talks about a continuous process of building excellence and personal commitment to it. Someone has also said that “you take yourself to such a high level of excellence that no one can ignore you” which echoes the same aspect. Excellence is a personal thing and relative in nature. It is on each one of us to decide what level one wants to achieve. The goalpost is set by us and it is perfectly normal to keep on moving the goalpost and this is applicable to activities not only from professional side but on the personal side also. Let us take a simple example of “driving”; most of us drive either four-wheeler or two-wheeler; for simplicity we will stick to a four wheeler driving in day today life (not racing or rallying etc.) and I am assuming that we want to be excellent driver to take this discussion forward. The process starts with one talking to oneself regarding what would be the benchmark to be used at that juncture e.g. if a person is just started to learn driving, the benchmark could be choosing of correct lane on the road, giving correct signals, driving in the center of the lane, using the appropriate gears while driving, etc. you are focused to achieve this desired level of excellence and you are happy and satisfied if you are able to do these things while driving. At this juncture you do feel that you are an excellent driver in your league. As you gain experience and get deeper understanding in to driving, your benchmarks start changing such as you need to be able to do a parallel parking between two cars, you should be able to drive comfortably on steep and winding roads, you should be able to drive with maximum fuel efficiency, the ride should be a comfortable on any kind of road, no tickets for traffic rule violations, etc. and you no more feel you are an excellent driver but think that you need to learn a lot to become the excellent driver. So you work on your driving, experiment and get understanding and at the end you feel satisfied that you have reached the desired excellence. Again the cycle starts after some time and the process goes on and on. It becomes evident that One defines what one means by excellence, one commits to reach the level, once you reach the level, typically one checks the definition of excellence and finds the definition is changed and one again works to achieve the same. This is true of all activities and all people whether it is personal or professional or organizational activity.

Observation of self and interaction of self with all entities other than self is extremely vital for a student of excellence. If one observes one self and his/her journey from birth till today, one can see so many examples of similar nature happening continuously in our life. It is critical to be cognizant of these little things and channelize them in such a manner that we are able to build excellence to such a height that we become benchmark for others.