Provoking Excellence In An Era Of Change

Fresco by Raphael

The School of Athens represents all the greatest mathematicians, philosophers and scientists from classical antiquity gathered together sharing their ideas and learning from each other. These figures all lived at different times, but here they are gathered together under one roof.

Source: Khan Academy

Provoking Excellence In An Era Of Change

As we launch our new offers for helping leaders and entrepreneurs create remarkable selves, careers, and enterprises, I am gripped by this question of provoking excellence. In this conversation, we will discuss what is excellence, why provoke excellence, and why now is the time to do it. We will cover the topic of how we may provoke excellence, in the subsequent conversations. So, let us begin. 

What Is Excellence?

What is excellence? Oxford dictionary defines excellence as the quality of being outstanding or extremely good. To me, excellence is living with all that we got and bringing forth all that is hidden and accessible in the depths of our beings. Excellence is not something that could be defined in isolation, as a medium or matter or a static quality to be possessed. Excellence has to do with who you are being in relationship to your existential environment. Excellence and the opportunity for it can only show up in the background of undignifying circumstances. To many people, this may sound contrary to common sense. In many cultures around the world, excellence is an elitist idea. (Only the very top elite could be excellent. For example, only the ruler is referred to as his or her excellency). So when people that are most subjected to indignity and insult caused by both, nature and man, hear the question of excellence, it seems far-fetched to them. Upon hearing the invitation to provoking excellence, a sudden resignation comes up and the question is considered to be a waste of time or impractical. These unexamined resignations become habits of thought and ways of being that serve to keep one trapped in spite of one’s best intentions and efforts. 

We must challenge these archaic archetypes and see clearly that we don’t want to begrudge the circumstances. We want to see the undignifying circumstances of our lives as opportunities for provoking excellence in ourselves, our work, and our personal environments.

To do something excellently is then giving oneself fully to the task and challenge at hand while exploring all personal and social faculties and tools available for doing so. 

Excellence, therefore, is not a one-time occurrence or an inborn quality. Excellence is then an ongoing pursuit of dissolving self-imposed limitations and cultivating habits for success.

Why Provoke Excellence? 

Why do we want to concern ourselves with provoking excellence? We want to provoke excellence because we want to make the most out of life and the opportunity of being alive that is available to us. 

Harvard scholar, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, in dealing with a similar question says, 

“Life is the greatest good…. We squander the good of life by surrendering to a diminished way of being in the world. We settle for routine and compromise. We stagger half-conscious, through the world. Anxious for the future, we lose life in the only time we have—the present. This squandering is dying many times. Our interest is to stop this dying so we can live until we die all at once.” 

Dr. Unger is on to something here. We are surely pushed into this life, without our choice. The going-on of life propels us into circumstances, not of our choosing. We cannot choose what happens to us. But the quality of our life and the depth of our experience is not merely determined by the circumstances we encounter. Our experience and quality of life are determined by how we respond to the circumstances. 

The nature of life is tragic. How come? We all want unconditional love but none are able to give it. Our dreams are larger than our lives and our capacities and our time on earth are limited. There is no definitive path to success and we encounter roadblocks and breakdowns in all domains of life. We often don’t get what we want. And when by a stroke of a chance we do, we become dissatisfied soon enough with what we got and want new things. 

We are the kind of beings that invent our own dissatisfactions. I want to be clear—there is nothing wrong with all this. This is how it is. Our aim is not to change how life is. In the face of this ungrounded and tragic existence, our aim is to explore our maximum capacity for dealing with it—so that we may continue to discover new horizons—so that we may live dignified and powerful lives. 

As entrepreneurs, and leaders who want to become fully-expressed and fully-powered human beings, we refuse to succumb to circumstances. Our love for our families, our tribes, our nations, our people, and our planet, moves us to confront the indignity that life subjects us to. 

The depth of life is mysterious and unknown to us. It behooves us to consider life a cherished gift from sources unknown. It would behoove us to make the most of this opportunity that's right in front of us. 

So we ask ourselves this question; how might we encounter the circumstances of our lives in such a way so that our experience of life is transformed into an experience of fecundity, dignity, serenity, and power?   

And Why Now? 

From the dawn of time, human beings have been concerned with maximizing their experience of life and all the good that it has to offer. The father of western philosophy, Socrates himself was deeply concerned with living a life of purpose and was committed until his dying breath to the pursuit of the question of excellence, which he called Arete. To Socrates wisdom was not some packaged goods but the constant pursuit of excellence. 

His student, Aristotle, famously said, “You are what you do repeatedly. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, it is a habit”. Later philosopher, in the same western lineage, Frederic Nietzsche, talking about human potential once said, “I am not a human being. I am a dynamite”.  

Socrates, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and many others since have brought us treasures on the topic of maximizing human potential. However, it falls to each successive generation to reinvestigate this question in the light of the challenges, changes, and breakdowns encountered in their own era, and reinvent themselves accordingly. 

This is not a benign question. Asking this question of how one may pursue a life of excellence, this question of Arete, cost Socrates his life. At his time, it was “clear” to everyone that one must follow “what everyone knows”—what they had learned from the gods of their times. There must have been “clear and well-established social guidelines” on how one may live and succeed. And even pursuing an alternative path for asking how one may live his or her life’s full potential, was blasphemous. Is this question still blasphemous today? Possibly. Today “everyone knows” how to become their excellent selves. Study hard, work hard, be sharp, be selfish, and plow your way through life with plans. Right? 

But we ought to wonder, what is it that we are up against today, and how might we cultivate skills and sensibilities to encounter the challenges of our dynamic era. “Planning” works for known and stable futures. For futures unknown and unstable, planning is useless. Are our modern institutions and ways of thinking preparing our current and next generations powerfully for dealing with what is upon us? 

These are questions that are worth much more than a superficial treatment with common sense. So let us take a look at the state of our world so that we may realize the urgency of posing such a question. 

Dawn of a New Era

As we enter the 21st century, we find our world in a state of deep turbulence and anxiety as the structures that have held it together for centuries are breaking down at an unprecedented rate. Terrorism, climate threat, imminent global financial collapse, the polarization of masses, environment and food corruption, the rise of mental and physical diseases, poverty, slavery, cruelty to animals, the collapse of family structures, shortage of water, unhappiness with work, refugee situations, and other major global breakdowns are on a serious rise while new ones are peaking their heads. The collapse of our civilization as we know it has begun. 

We are living in evolutionary times and our world is on fire. Our society and our enterprises are in the middle of a profound transformation, and the rate of change is accelerating globally. The moods and temperature of our planet and its inhabitants are increasingly turning ‘hot and sour’.  

Worse yet, the old education and structures of existence are failing us. The old stabilities once worked, are no longer working. Methods for creating value, that were sufficient even a decade ago, won’t be sufficient, in the era that is now upon us. Machineries, tools, and educations about work, business, and life that once looked solid and grounded are no longer reliable.

Our pre-established sensibilities have failed us.  

While these monstrosities are on the rise, what should we do to prepare ourselves?

We live in the age of networks, and nothing we have studied before in our universities and schools, in a way of education has prepared us to deal with what’s happening now. At the same time, a “New Era” and new configurations of power are emerging and with them new satisfactions, new dissatisfactions, and new opportunities for innovation. 

Today, we have more access to technology, more demand, and more means for individual expression, production, commerce, and freedom than ever before. Virtually all knowledge is available to most humans via personal technologies. At the same time, there is a growing mistrust in our pre-existing institutions (of religions, governments, education, therapies, and news media) for guidance. 

George Orwell’s depiction of big brother’s control has morphed into a form of a decentralized self-sabotaging self-monitoring economic operating system run by big data around the world. Everyone is free to make money, but money is concentrating in the hands of the few. The contemporary American philosopher, Shoshana Zhubov characterizes our times, and rightly so, as the title of her latest book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.” Our world is getting so complex that even the smartest of human beings have a hard time wrapping their minds around the totality of things today. 

Yet, it should be clear to anyone seriously watching the shift of tides in our time, that in the New Era that is upon us, winners and losers will be determined by their sensibilities for reading the new world and their capacity for dynamic action and innovation. Knowledge is ever-present, abundant, and useless. What you know, ain’t so. Capacity for insights and action is everything. 

To survive and thrive in what is next, we must develop new senses for insight, new networks of trust, and new skills for action. Anyone who is reluctant to change, and relying on yesterday's sensibilities are at the greatest risk of being run over, being made irrelevant by the market forces that are beyond the control of any single person or group. If there was ever a need for provoking the uncomfortable topic of personal, professional, organizational, and cultural excellence, it is now, or never!