Excellent is right now, In the next five minutes
Excellence is a life choice
In my training schedule, I make time for daily inspiration. Now For example, I am reading Tim Ferriss‘s book Tribe of Mentors. “Excellence is the next five minutes, forget the long term, make the next five minutes Rock,” says Tom Peters, who is one of the mentors in the book. Excellent is right now, I love that.
Coming from a man pursuing excellence for more than four decades, I find this highly inspiring. Basically, what he’s saying is that excellence is a life choice we can make again and again every five minutes. So if you fail to excel in the five minutes that just passed, you can choose again for the next five minutes and do it better this time.
No excuses
I found myself cleaning the kitchen after dinner with much more intention the day I read that quote. It implies that excellence is within everyone’s reach; it’s a question of intent, not somewhere in the future, but here and now.
There are no excuses in pursuit of excellence if you approach it this way. The next five minutes can always be an improvement in so many ways if you only put your mind to it. So try this out, whatever you’re doing, give it everything you have, and do your best.
Make excellence your habit
I believe it’s a question of practice, like many other things. If you practice being excellent at what you’re doing every five minutes, you’ll end up excelling at everything you do soon enough.
Assuming you do what you love and that you made your best foundational life choice about that. Excelling at it is a natural aspiration. Whatever it is, at whatever level you are at, improve as best you can in the next five minutes.
Share the pursuit of excellence
If you implement this approach, you will incrementally grow the quality of your work, possibly in a much shorter time than expected. It would be good to create your excellence criteria list and work towards them. By doing this, you will be practicing another vital confidence-boosting skill – your integrity, first with yourself, then with others.
In general, you may need help pursuing excellence, and sharing this pursuit with others will exponentially improve your chances of excelling. It may also inspire others and create a ripple effect that may exceed your expectations. You will eventually realize that this is an infinite life-long game, immensely more fun if you play it with others.
Feel free to share your experience in pursuit of excellence, it may inspire others too.
One Comment
Eviatar Nevo
First and foremost I praise and love your weekly blogs.They are thouhtful, interesting, attractive and ispirational. Hence I look forward to read and enjoy them every weekend. Here I wish to comment how I do it despite my obvious compromises. I was born to parents who were very creative and I inherited from them the passion of imagination and creativity. My father, your grandfather, was a wise scholar from birth fortified by his cultural environment in Volozyn Yeshiva In Lituaniya. Then all his life were devoted to creative and productive work writing plays for young students and his masterpiece at his later life was writing about "Hegyonot" or logical thoughts about all life perspectives. You have it at home and could inspect it in your free time. Essentially he was a philosopher of human life. My mother, your grandmother, was a born creator and ardent rebel. She was a genuine artist and loved dancing and music. Possibly you inherited from her the love for dance. I inherited fom both creativity, the love of beauty, and the drive for justce and truth. My creativity was intertwined with immense curiosity about the world material and live. Happily I retained it till my later years. even now I keep wondering about the world at large, nonliving and living, space, time, life and their origins. When not creating myself I listen and read on the creations of others in all life perspectives, including yours. I hear early in the morning the pigoen's singing, and when going with Rudi on sabbatical morning to Evolution Canyon I keep admiring the beautiful harmony of nature, landscapes, plants, and animals, and their origin and evolution. I am truly happy that till today in my later years this wonder and amazement of beautiful nature is still retained actively. This unfolding mystery of nature is my prolonged drive in life. It inspires me and remains a long lasting magic. Happily I could learn through evolution, fossil and molecular biology ,the fascintating evolution of mother nature. This prompted my love of arts and sciences till the end of life.