Tag: discover

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.

Book Review – Ego is the Enemy

~ Joshua Best ~ 1 Comment
Book: Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

We take risks. We mess up. The problem is that when we get our identity tied up in our work, we worry that any kind of failure will then say something bad about us as a person. It’s a fear of taking responsibility, of admitting that we might have messed up. It’s the sunk cost fallacy. And so we throw good money and good life after bad and end up making everything so much worse.

Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy, p.189

You can’t tell from this carefully staged photo, but if you turn this book to its side and look at the edges you’ll see a disaster—about half a cup of coffee is splashed along the outer pages and leaves some embarrassing evidence of my clumsiness one fine November morning. It also quite clearly illustrates that “stuff happens” and regardless of the outer mess that sometimes gets thrown at us, at our core we can remain unchanged like the words on these pages.

Sure, there’s some coffee spilt and some pages are stained, but the words—the message—is still there if you’re willing to open the mess up and look for it. We still control our stories even if we can’t control the scratches, torn pages, and other “stuff” life happens to throw at us.

Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best version of themselves.

Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy, p. 197

Here, we have a book about the phantom of success. Ryan Holiday gives us a guide for practicing mindfulness and humility during the good times as a caution against the downfall that can follow when our egos run amok. Too often, when things are going our way and we’re winning, we begin to lose the perspective that helped get us to the top. Once that frame of reference is lost, it’s just a matter of time before we experience our own fall from grace.

The danger lies when we come to expect greatness but forget about the sacrifices or lucky breaks that led to our success. That’s where Holiday excels in this book. He delivers us a variety of material to help us find our center in a world of uncertainty where success and failure are not a matter of fairness but often a measure of both luck and perseverance.

Ego is the Enemy is a fast, accessible read and an entertaining source of real world histories and anecdotes that illustrate the perils of allowing the ego free range in our lives. Some may argue that the Ego can be a source of motivation that drives one to achieve greatness, but Holiday counters that the Ego is more often a toxic mindset.

We love the big personalities of our celebrities, trailblazers and industry pioneers. However, we tend to confuse personality with Ego when we create fictitious narratives about the lives of our heroes.

  • Ego tells us we’re the best and we will always be the best.
  • Perseverance acknowledges that we may be the best today, but that it’s going to be a lot of hard work to stay the best.
  • Personality reflects how well we communicate and connect with others.

Clearly, personality has nothing to do with either. We can have a great personality and be a terrible decision-maker. That’s the message I enjoyed the most in this reading. Through the lives and experiences of notable men and women, we get an opportunity to learn from their experience and a chance to mitigate our own failures.

Journeys are neither destinations nor goals

~ Joshua Best ~ Leave a comment

Who said it could not be done? And what great victories has he to his credit which qualify him to judge others?

Napoleon Hill

Today, I propose the start of an experiment in living our best lives. I can’t promise we’ll find lasting happiness, but I know that we can find clarity and purpose.

Each of us has a unique opportunity to own our experience in this world. Rather than be thrown around by chance, we can choose the paths we will walk in this life.

We don’t have control over many things like where we were born, what we look like, or even our intelligence. We do, however, always have personal ownership over how we respond to our circumstances. We could always leave the town we were born in. We can dress our best, even if we’re not supermodels. We will still learn new things, even if we’ll never be geniuses.

  • Do your reactions to your circumstances help or hinder your efforts to build a better life?

No one has the power to control our response to circumstances. We get to decide how we will react to every new experience. In the end, our greatest strength comes from our ability to choose how we respond to the difficulties and limitations in our path.

  • We can’t control the world.
  • We can’t control others.
  • We can’t control nature.

Really, there’s only one thing we can control. We can be mindful of how our perceptions influence our responses. Mindfulness can empower us to make more impactful decisions that will improve our lives even when we lack the ability to control the external conditions which trouble us.

  • The world is both a place of opportunity and oppression depending on who you ask.

Our goal must be to learn how we can overcome the obstacles in our path and find the opportunities hidden from us. If you change nothing in your life today, you only guarantee that nothing in your life will change tomorrow. Is that what any of us want? Why not choose a path of action instead?

  • What does it means to be human?
  • How can we find meaning in this existence?

Create your own path. That’s how you know that this philosophy is more than a trend or a motivational thriller. We’ve been exploring these same ideas across the millennia from every civilization. The same questions on your mind today were being discussed a thousand years ago.

There isn’t an answer written here. There’s only a path presented that you can choose to walk. Here are some final thoughts to help you on your journey.

  1. Question everything.
  2. Trust there’s always a path you have not yet tried.
  3. Don’t give up. Progress only stops when you do. If you lose your way, you can always start again.