Excellence Defined

The dictionary meaning of Excellence is “the state or quality of excelling or being exceptionally good; extreme merit; superiority”. So what does it really mean – is it being better than others or is it best amongst the population under comparison or is it best of individual abilities? It is subjective and leaves a lot for interpretation and deliberation. It also creates confusion in mind for a student of excellence as to assess if he / she has reached a level which can be called as excellence. It also becomes difficult to build a curriculum or a framework to identify the levels of excellence and define methods to step by step improvement of the same. Excellence has remained in the realms of perception vis a vis a benchmark used by the person. The literature on excellence more or less is either focused in a specific area where in author is able to define excellence and then build a model around the same so the frameworks mentioned are applicable to the specific area and not all. Some authors take a different route by considering excellence as a personality trait and talk about how do we nurture and improve this trait. There is another thought process as expressed in the quote by Colin Powell “If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude” so it talks about excellence in every small thing we do and automatically we will do large things with excellence. Aristotle says “We are what we repeatedly do, Excellence, then, is not an act but habit”. Sometimes we hear in our offices instructions like “this is a very special customer and we must be excellent in our performance and not like customer B for whom you can relax a bit” so the question arises “can we be excellent doing a specific work for one customer and not excellent doing the same work for other customer” and if one does display this type of behavior, can we say that he/she is excellent?

I feel, Excellence is the commitment one makes with one self to continuously do better than what one has done previously in the entire activities one performs on personal and professional life.  The benchmark is oneself and it is continuously moving upwards. There is not end as to final level of excellence