Despite what some might think, particularly those with a sense of entitlement, excellence is not a destination.
There’s always a new challenge or a higher level to aspire to. The simple fact is, you will always be a little bit better tomorrow than you were yesterday. That’s what makes excellence so exciting. There’s always something to strive towards, something to shoot for, a reason for being.
The problem with entitlement thinking is that you believe you’re entitled to something – without having put in the required effort. It’s not just about hard work, anyone can be busy. It’s about committing to purposeful effort, consistently and over time, towards your goals. It’s such a simple concept – to beat entitlement thinking, you need to put in place the mechanisms to support you in doing the work and achieving your goals.
It’s not about being degree qualified, being a genius or even having a high IQ. Although these are all great achievements that typically require a level of excellence and should be celebrated, they are just steps on your journey through life towards a greater goal – where a real sense of fulfilment dismisses any sense of entitlement.
Doing the work, at any stage during your life, means committing to being at your best right now. Those who genuinely commit to and focus on achieving their goals, more often than not, enjoy every stage of their journey. Yes, they come across tough times, but they overcome life’s challenges by being at their best and responding accordingly.
Unfortunately, it’s an all too familiar situation when we hear people complaining about what they should have or what they don’t have and why it’s not fair. Let’s all stop comparing ourselves to each other. Instead of comparing yourself to someone who has something you don’t, how about you map out what you need to do to achieve what you want and start working towards it.
Stop compromising and start prioritising
Surely you know the difference between right and wrong? Great, so let’s work on committing to good effort and look at how we might be able to avoid, or at least minimise, wasted effort. When we compromise on doing the right thing for ourselves, we deny ourselves the opportunity to achieve our goals, which in turn leads to unnecessary heartache, disappointment, stress and resentment. A stressed mind never makes great decisions, especially when it comes to getting the right work done.
There’s always better, regardless of the role you play, your position in the organisational chart or the stage in your career. Continually striving for excellence should be part of your everyday, both personally and professionally. Excellence smashes entitlement thinking because we’re always learning, always being challenged, always wanting to know more and always wanting to improve.
Excellence allows us to maintain a healthy mindset around our desire to know more so that we can contribute more tomorrow
Excellence will also expose us to feedback, which we shouldn’t fear. It is after-all, an opportunity for us to learn and be better. People who respond well to feedback will benefit from the growth they experience and are more likely to become ‘haves’ as opposed to ‘have nots’. When we’re faced with failure and we take the time to review through an excellence lens, we’re able to build resilience which in turn allows us to take the next step. Failure is just another form of feedback and the resilience formed as a result allows you to better position yourself to confidently tackle new challenges, removing any sense of entitlement.
Excellence also demands improvisation. It’s important to have a plan, but to ensure you’re best positioned to tackle anything life throws at you, you need to be able to improvise. You also need to be prepared to take a few risks to get things done – nothing crazy, but your ability to be able to respond and recover quickly, may be the difference between a step forward or a step back. Improvisations are made in an attempt to continually move forward. Sometimes we will fail and sometime we will succeed. Avoiding unnecessary barriers, like procrastination, indecision, inability to improvise and/or a sense of entitlement will better position you to overcome any failures, clearing a path for excellence.
Despite always demanding more work and more effort, excellence is worth striving for, achieving, maintaining and enjoying. We owe it to ourselves to be better, to earn our stripes.
Our aim should be to always shoot for excellence, after all, being excellent is much more fun
