How to make excellence a habit
Today I want to talk to you all about Arete. That’s a powerful word.
To the Greeks, it meant excellence. It was the ultimate expression of moral, physical, and spiritual human greatness. It’s what the Stoics were chasing. It’s what you’re chasing today.
But how do we get there? Well, it requires a certain philosophical approach. Because brilliance, inspiration and skill are not enough.
“Virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions,” Aristotle said. The writer Will Durant interpreted it thusly: “We are what we repeatedly do… therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.”
In other words: Excellence isn’t this thing you do one time. It’s a way of living. It’s foundational. It’s like an operating system and the code this system operates on is habit.
Consistently good not occasionally great
I grew up playing sports and believe the world of sports is the best way to make this point. Our world loves sports, and most sports are a zero-sum game; one team wins, and the other loses. But this is a horrible model for our increasingly interconnected world. We need to stop glorifying winners and teaching our young people to admire only the Olympic gold medalist or the World Champions. It is far better to encourage someone to embody the Olympic work ethic than to brainwash them that the only path to success is to beat everyone else.
99.9% of us won't beat everyone else. We won't be great in the sense that we vanquish all others. But we still can be great in the sense that we consistently do our best and help others in a meaningful way.
Give me 20 consistently good people and we can change the world. The same is true for you. Align yourself with people who care more about progress than pride, and who have a bigger work ethic than ego. Get stuff done. Get excited by what you achieve, and share that excitement with others.
While someone else is aiming for the stars, you will make a meaningful difference in our world and in the lives of people with whom you interact.
If you are interested in excellence then you have to start building a habit of working hard now.
What’s a habit?
A habit is a tendency or practice that is repeated, often involuntarily. To add to that definition, in The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg introduced the concept of the habit loop, which governs your habits and is comprised of three elements:
The cue: the trigger that activates the loop
The routine: an automatic action or response
The reward: a positive reward that tells your brain the loop is worth repeating
The habit loop is almost completely involuntary. For example, perhaps you have a habit of waiting until the last moment to meet a deadline. Maybe every time you sit down to comply, you wind up surfing the internet instead. The three elements of this habit loop are:
The cue: seeing the internet browser on your computer’s desktop
The routine: clicking on the internet browser icon
The reward: chatting with your friends on different social media channels and being well-informed
This behaviour is certainly not a productive way to act, and if we repeat it, it’s a bad habit. The challenge is to replace that loop with a positive habit through a concept I call the “excellence attitude loop.”****
The “excellence attitude loop” is a process that starts with “excellence” as the final destination and works backwards. It helps you identify exactly what steps you need to take for self-improvement. Once you isolate the needed steps, then you can know which habits will support and foster them.
What habits will you build?
If you can cultivate good habits, you can survive—even thrive no matter what lies ahead. If you relapse and fall to the level of your worst habits, hard times will only be harder.
I’m inviting you to spend the rest of the month challenging yourself to change what you “repeatedly do.” And I am promising that if you can do that, you can achieve arete—personally and professionally.
If you want to be or do something, Epictetus said, make a habit of it. So let’s make a habit of arete.
And let’s remember his most urgent and challenging question: How much longer are you going to wait to demand the best of yourself?
How about not one second longer?
Let’s start today.
Have a great week
M.T. Omoniyi
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