Choose Excellence over Perfection

~ Joshua Best ~ Leave a comment

“I find it amusing that when we look to nature we never find perfection. We find beauty. We find organization. We find purpose. So, why is it we’re always looking for more than those simple truths?”

We need to stop looking for perfection in our everyday life. Otherwise, we just end up wasting time chasing after an impossible dream. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek excellence. We should push ourselves, and others, to perform better, stronger, more amazing feats, but recognize that it’s excellence we’re after and not perfection.

Excellence is about overcoming obstacles by creating systems for success. When we focus on perfection as a goal, we can only be disappointed. This is because perfection can only be achieved in the imaginative mind. Perfection is an idea but not tangible goal. We have to stop setting ourselves up for failure. We need to search for purpose instead.

Try using purposeful intent to drive your performance to new levels of excellence. One key idea to keep in mind is that all systems of success are based on a solid foundation of good habits. Maybe it’s time to take a look at our habits and ask some uncomfortable questions?

  • In what ways am I taking shortcuts and not living to my fullest potential?
  • What excuses have I made about my recent performance or poor decisions?
  • What’s one positive habit I’ve put off adopting? Can I commit to accomplishing it for a day? A week? A month?
  • What is the driving force behind your desire to change or grow today? How is this different from your desires to define yourself in the past?

It only takes perseverance and time to turn short term commitments into lifelong habits. Growth can’t happen without active engagement. We have to make the tough decisions to initiate change. We own our experience. We accept responsibility for what is within our control and acknowledge that there will plenty of obstacles outside of that control. Our acceptance, and resilience in the face of hardship, begins our journey toward excellence.

Don’t give up

~ Joshua Best ~ Leave a comment

“Consider at what price you sell your integrity; but please, for God’s sake, don’t sell it cheap.”-Epictetus, Discourses I

When the new year came you made commitments to yourself. How sad would it be if you cannot keep the promises you made to yourself?

When you follow through on your commitments something amazing happens. You begin to build resilience, and that resilience translates into more productive and empowering days.

These days will quickly pass. Before you realize it, you will have either built a future from powerful, life-changing habits, or you will have lost your willpower and be left alone and disappointed for failing to take a stand to be someone better than you were yesterday.

So, be strong. Take a stand, and invest in your future today by always keeping the promises you make to yourself. It’s really a type of self-fulfilling mental hack available to anyone with the patience to use it. It’s the legendary self-fulfilling prophecy in action. Believe in hard work and you will see positive results from your efforts.

When you keep the promises you make to yourself, you also increase your faith in your ability to succeed in the presence of hardship. You will begin to have the courage to seek greater challenges, and you will find that fewer things in life intimidate you.

You will have built a reservoir of trust, and you will now know that when you make a decision in life you will have the follow through needed to accomplish your goals. Faith in that belief is an important source of personal strength.

Remember, you choose to build up or tear down that faith every day based on the decisions you make.

Appreciate even the unpleasant moments

~ Joshua Best ~ Leave a comment

Obsessing about getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want does not result in happiness.

The Lojong text

As long as you’re focusing on fulfilling your desires, you’re going to end up being miserable. Obsessing over getting what you want and complaining when things don’t go your way is a little absurd after all. So, why do we do this to ourselves?

Your happiness is not limited to what chance happens to send your way. You can reframe your perception at any time and focus on what you can control. Try to create internal strengths like establishing positive thoughts, sound reason and look for wisdom rather than knowledge. It’s one thing to know that you have a problem. It’s an entirely different reality to understand how that problem came to be and what you can do to resolve it.

At any given moment, your actions and choices will be limited by a thousand obstacles beyond your control—wealth, law, strength, time, location, genetics. These are just a few of the obstacles you will face. Your thoughts, however, can be limitless if you train your mind to accept what cannot be changed and to overcome what is possible.

We don’t do that though. We tend to practice escapism rather than mindfulness in our culture. We just can’t seem to enjoy living in the unpleasant moments. We’re strangely more motivated to snap the perfect selfie–to share with strangers on the internet–than we are to risk experiencing the uncomfortableness of reflecting on the quality of our lives.

I think therein lies the crux of the problem. Living in the moment requires you to experience and accept the disappointments and unpleasantness that surround you within any given breath. You experience the passing of time and the consequences of the choices you make. You must experience something in order to appreciate it. So, if we fail to reflect on our decisions and disappointments, is it really a surprise we fail to appreciate life? If we lack the capacity to appreciate living, then where do we expect to find happiness? In death?