Excellence is Habit

Excellence is Habit

Will Durant, a famous philosopher and writer of the book The Story of Philosophy, has said very aptly, “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy'.

He says it very nicely and clearly that we will not wake up one day and say we have reached excellence or it is not that we will keep on training ourselves and we will achieve excellence after a certain period; but what ever we do, when ever we do defines our excellence. There is no specific scale to measure and compare against. There are no international standards / benchmarks we can refer to and try to achieve / comply. The only benchmark is ourselves and we get measured by what we do and how we do things. So we define our level of excellence through the level depicted in most of our actions. We normally will display different level of excellence in various actions we perform in our day today life. Our level of excellence is perceived at the level where we have performed the maximum time. The other instances when we have performed better or worse than this are typically discounted.

This actually means we have a habit of performing at a level of excellence (where we have performed maximum number of times). This Habit defined our level of excellence and what ever habit we have adopted for doing actions, we are at that level of excellence. I am currently in Japan for work and I am observing this phenomenon right from when I landed. Take a simple thing like greeting a person when you meet, the way a Japanese person will greet is very elaborate and respectful. Plus this is consistent, every time you meet, the greeting would be elaborate, sincere; even when you meet multiple people, they all will greet you in similar manner. This all looks very different from the perspective of a non Japanese person, and we wonder how they can do this every day and every time they meet some one. But if you look from Japanese perspective, it is just a habit they have formed from their childhood and they just do it, they do not feel they are doing anything elaborate or different than what they have been doing. You can see such things in many simple tasks which puts them on higher level of excellence and many of us.

When we are calling it as a Habit, and we know the nature of our Habits, i.e. we try to change them but they keep coming back to same level, so is it destined for every one to perform at a certain level of excellence and no more? Is there any way to break our habits of actions at lower level of excellence and get habituated to act at higher level of excellence? Lot of questions come to our mind and we look for that magic wand or magic training program or magic book or magic medicine or something like that which, when we do we can move quickly in to new habits. We also know the answers, very simple, habits change by doing things differently and consistently. The two words differently and consistently are very important; differently, we know that we need to be at different level of excellence and we do the action in that fashion to define new level of excellence for us and consistently, which is the most important thing, that every time we do this action again, we will do it at the newly found level of excellence. It takes patience to change habits and also one can not change the habits drastically at one go they need to be changed “bit-by-bit” as I have mentioned in my one of my earlier blog.  

Also when one try to operate with one set of habits in personal life and another set of habits in professional life, we find it extremely difficult. The habits are the things that come naturally to you and you do not have to make any special effort when you are doing the same. If you have to act not according to your habits, there are high chances of failure or internal stress built up, which can create failure in some other area. So if we are not acting with same habits in our personal and professional life, one must look at it and see how one can start merging these two things. This will be the first set of habits that the person will need to change and once he becomes stress free that he does not have to remember about which surrounding he is taking the action, he can start focusing on improving the action itself.    

So our habits define how we do our actions and our actions define level of excellence we operate at. Actions through habit are very natural to us and excellence is also natural to every human being. So let us get in to habit of performing each action at higher level of excellence that we are habituated to perform.