You've been lied to about excellence.
They told you it's about grinding harder. About perfecting systems. About optimizing what already exists.
That's not excellence. That's just the hamster wheel painted a different color.
True excellence isn't about running the race better. It's about changing the track entirely.
Richard Feynman didn't solve impossible physics problems by working harder than other scientists. He invented a new visual language – simple stick figure diagrams that looked like a child's doodles but solved what complex equations couldn't.
Feynman wasn't just any physicist – he was a Nobel Prize winner who helped develop the atomic bomb on the Manhattan Project and later became one of the most celebrated scientific minds of the 20th century. What made him extraordinary wasn't just his intelligence but his completely different approach to problem-solving. While his colleagues at CalTech and Princeton buried themselves in impenetrable mathematics, Feynman created a visual system that made quantum mechanics intuitive. These "Feynman diagrams" revolutionized physics and are still used today, allowing scientists to calculate what happens when particles interact without drowning in pages of equations.
Excellence doesn't play by the rules. It rewrites them.
This is what Aristotle missed when he said: "Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution."
I love it. But he nailed the ingredients while missing the recipe. Excellence isn't just intentional – it's subversive.
It questions assumptions everyone else has forgotten are assumptions.
And that's where your opportunity hides.
The Invisible Box Trapping Your Potential
Your industry has "best practices." Established methods. Proven playbooks.
These aren't wrong. They're worse than wrong.
They're average.
Every time you follow a best practice, you're guaranteeing mediocrity. By definition, if everyone does it, it creates zero advantage.
Excellence begins precisely where best practices end.
Your competition lives inside an invisible box labeled "how things are done." They think they're being strategic by optimizing inside that box. They're actually ensuring their own mediocrity.
You see it in how they think:
- "Let's do what works, but better"
- "That's just how our industry operates"
- "We need to follow established patterns"
These thoughts aren't harmless. They're excellence killers.
The real question isn't "How can I do this better than my competition?"
It's "What if the fundamental assumptions my competition believes are actually holding them back?"
The difference isn't subtle. It's everything.
And this mindset shift opens a door to the next level of your potential.
The Painful Path to Seeing Reality
You can't create excellence without first seeing reality clearly.
Most people can't handle reality. They build elaborate cushions between themselves and hard truths.
These cushions feel comfortable but make excellence impossible.
Ray Dalio understood this when building Bridgewater Associates – now the world's largest hedge fund. He created "radical transparency," where painful truths aren't just accepted, they're actively hunted down.
Employees call out weaknesses, challenge bosses directly, and ruthlessly dissect ideas looking for flaws. Many brilliant people can't handle it and quit.
Those who stay consistently outperform everyone else in the market.
Why? Because their excellence threshold is determined by their truth threshold.
Your capacity to achieve excellence is directly proportional to your capacity to face uncomfortable reality.
How often do you actively seek feedback that makes you cringe? How often do you say what needs to be said when silence would be easier?
That's not just your comfort zone boundary. It's your excellence ceiling.
And raising that ceiling requires a simple but painful choice: choose truth over comfort, especially when nobody's watching.
But what if your biggest limitations aren't what's holding you back, but actually pushing you forward?
The Counterintuitive Power of Constraints
Here's what nobody tells you about excellence: it rarely comes from abundance. It emerges from strategic limitation.
We're conditioned to believe that more resources, more time, and more freedom naturally lead to better outcomes.
Reality shows the opposite.
The Apollo 13 mission turned potential disaster into NASA's finest achievement not despite constraints but because of them. When an oxygen tank exploded, engineers had to build a carbon dioxide filter using only what the astronauts had available – duct tape, plastic bags, and a flight manual cover.
Those limitations forced creative thinking that unlimited resources never would have prompted.
Your constraints aren't obstacles to excellence. They're the raw material for it.
What limitation in your business are you fighting that might actually be your greatest potential advantage?
The founder complaining about limited funding might be sitting on the constraint that forces genuine innovation rather than copy-paste solutions.
The creator frustrated by a small audience might have the perfect conditions for developing truly original work rather than playing to the crowd.
Your path to excellence isn't eliminating constraints. It's leveraging them deliberately.
But navigating this path requires holding two seemingly opposite ideas in your mind at once.
The Paradox You Must Embrace
Excellence requires holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously:
You must master existing rules while preparing to break them completely.
Most people choose one path or the other. They either become obedient practitioners of conventional wisdom or arrogant disruptors who ignore foundations. Both paths lead to mediocrity.
True excellence emerges at the intersection of deep knowledge and radical reimagining.
This isn't just philosophical – it's practical.
Your journey to excellence follows this paradoxical path:
- Master the fundamentals more deeply than your peers
- Identify the hidden assumptions within those fundamentals
- Challenge the assumptions most central to your field
- Create a new approach that makes the old one obsolete
This is why true innovations rarely come from complete outsiders or complete insiders. They come from those who understand the system deeply enough to see exactly where it fails.
Your next level isn't choosing between tradition and disruption. It's using tradition as the launch pad for disruption.
But even with this knowledge, there's a more fundamental challenge you'll need to overcome.
The Real Barrier Standing In Your Way
The hardest part of excellence isn't talent, knowledge, or resources.
It's courage.
Not physical courage, but the social courage to be misunderstood – often for extended periods.
When Jeff Bezos outlined Amazon's strategy to prioritize growth over profits, Wall Street called it "Amazon.bomb" and predicted imminent failure. For years, Bezos was portrayed as delusional for investing in infrastructure instead of extracting quick profits.
His response reveals everything: "We are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."
This willingness to be temporarily misunderstood is necessary for eventual recognition.
Most people would rather be understood for their mediocrity than misunderstood for their excellence.
Your comfort with criticism directly affects what you can achieve. Every truly excellent idea will initially look wrong, excessive, or misguided to most people.
How much social discomfort can you tolerate while pursuing what you know is right? That's your excellence capacity.
And expanding that capacity might be the single highest-leverage investment you can make.
But excellence isn't just about having the courage to stand apart—it's also about understanding the nature of the journey itself.
The Moving Target That Changes Everything
Excellence isn't a fixed destination. It's a continuous process of improvement.
This seems frustrating at first. Why pursue what you can never fully achieve?
Because excellence isn't about the arrival at some fantasy finish line. It's about who you become in the pursuit.
The Japanese concept of kaizen embodies this perfectly. It's not about reaching some ideal final state. It's about creating a perpetual gap between where you are and where you could be, then continually closing that gap while knowing it will never fully disappear.
Toyota didn't revolutionize manufacturing by reaching some endpoint. They built systems that turned yesterday's excellence into today's baseline, and today's excellence into tomorrow's minimum standard.
This orientation toward the unattainable changes how you make decisions.
Instead of asking "Is this good enough?" you ask "Is this better than before?"
The standard isn't some fixed threshold – it's your previous best.
This approach isn't perfectionism, which is fear-based and stops progress. It's a productive mindset that recognizes potential improvements while still delivering your current best work.
And it transforms how you approach every aspect of your work.
But to put this mindset into practice, you need a practical tool that cuts through the noise.
The Question That Unlocks Everything
Most of your life and your decisions happen on autopilot. You follow habits, industry norms, and established patterns without much conscious thought.
Excellence requires interrupting this autopilot with a question that changes everything:
"What would this look like if it were excellent?"
Not good. Not competitive. Not impressive. Excellent.
This question reframes decisions from "What should I do?" to "What could this become?"
When Jiro Ono asked this about sushi, he didn't add more exotic ingredients. He stripped everything back to basics, obsessing over rice temperature and fish quality in ways other chefs thought excessive.
The result? A tiny restaurant in a subway station that earned three Michelin stars and worldwide recognition.
Ask this question about your product, your marketing, your customer experience, your daily habits.
The difference between your vision and current reality shows you where to improve.
And closing that gap requires a fundamental recalculation of risk—one that most people get completely wrong.
The Risk Equation That Changes Everything
Most people believe excellence is inherently riskier than mediocrity. After all, shooting for average means fewer chances to fail dramatically.
This calculation misses a crucial truth: The risks of excellence and mediocrity are fundamentally asymmetric.
The downside of pursuing excellence is limited. Worst case? You fail and end up with something merely good.
The downside of accepting mediocrity is unlimited. You guarantee you'll never create something extraordinary.
Excellence has bounded risk and unbounded reward. Mediocrity has bounded reward and unbounded risk.
When Howard Schultz reimagined Starbucks from a coffee bean retailer to a cafe experience, the company's board strongly opposed the idea. He had to leave and start his own company (Il Giornale) to prove the concept before eventually acquiring Starbucks and implementing his vision.
Had he failed, he would have created a few nice coffee shops. By succeeding, he transformed global coffee culture and built a company worth over $100 billion.
Most people systematically overestimate the risks of excellence while underestimating the risks of mediocrity.
This miscalculation leads to the tragic scenario where playing it safe becomes the riskiest strategy of all.
Your next level requires correcting this equation in your own decisions.
But ultimately, all of these insights really just come down to one fundamental truth about excellence.
The Choice That Defines Everything
Excellence isn't something that happens to you. It's something you choose.
That choice rarely comes as a single dramatic moment. It's made in small decisions that accumulate over time:
The decision to question an assumption when accepting it would be easier.
The decision to start over when what you've created is good but not excellent.
The decision to maintain a standard even when no one else would notice the difference.
These decisions seem small in isolation. Collectively, they define the difference between work that's forgotten and work that endures.
The gap between where you are and excellence isn't a skill gap or a resource gap.
It's a decision gap.
You know what excellence looks like. You just don't choose it when it costs too much.
As Aristotle reminds us: Excellence is never an accident.
It's a choice. Your choice.
And that choice is available to you right now, in whatever you're working on.
What will you choose today?
Thank you for reading.
– Scott
