Excellence

Nature has a set routine. The rising and setting of sun, the four seasons, the arrival and retreat of monsoons, the processes of successful organizations/institutions/groups, the basic framework of living a life and what not. To everything most people do is that they try and follow a certain routine and make one if there isn’t one.

A task repeated over and over again for the duration of ‘don’t know since when’ makes one perfect in skilfully doing it. Everything needs practice, everything needs routine. A fit body, a perfected dish, a fluent language OR anything big or trivial for that matter is perfected only by routine. That precisely is also the definition of excellence. You do one thing so many times that you can do it even in your dreams, perfect to the hilt. That’s excellence. Then you are the expert of your domain, the go to person for that one thing that defines you. Aspirational yet far! Desire breeds discipline, discipline breed routine, routine breed process, process breed efficiency and efficiency leads to excellence. Hard work all the way…very.

Excellent but just a tad bit boring, don’t you think? It’s more diligence and less intelligence, isn’t it? The curious mind put to rest a bit, or blinkered upon. For doing the same thing again and again is not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s a safe, known territory but not so much fun. Or is it? Let’s think again.

It’s a lot about the engagement of a potential mind than anything else. Some minds are happy doing the routine – it’s not mundane for them, it’s doing what they know best. Some like freshness coupled with routine, a kind of mix – keep them secure yet giving the taste and thrill of the unknown once in a while. But some just can’t stand the usual. It’s ‘been there done that’ for them. They live for the new experiences, the thrill and what lies ahead. And yet they all have the possibility to attain excellence in whatever they do because excellence is the same.

So, what engages one mind doesn’t engage the other and vice versa. And the engagement of mind is of paramount importance because it’s only the engaged mind that breeds creativity, which in turn keep things from getting boring. Hence the pursuit of excellence can be done for even the tiniest of trivia, such as packing the McDonalds burger in the same most efficient way possible, the problem is only when it doesn’t leave the room for a new better way/material for packing. That’s when routine kills creativity and that’s when everything becomes mundane and human becomes machine. Pack a burger or paint a canvas, cook a dish or create an architectural marvel, sell goods or sing your heart out, heal as a doctor or destroy in a morgue, usual or unusual – the element of engaging the mind in the act must be present. If it’s there, if doing what you do makes you feel good, stimulated and anticipated, you are alive and then excellence if not too far. You just have to repeat it over.