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Lessons - Excellence Is Never An Accident (Scott) · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, I want to speak about excellence and why excellence isn't always about
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  perfecting the existing system. I'm going to make the argument that it's about dismantling them
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  entirely. We're going to see how truly exceptional performers that have achieved mastery.
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  They aren't just working harder within this established framework. They're questioning the
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  frameworks themselves. You're going to discover why combining deep mastery with the courage to
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  challenge some fundamental assumptions creates an unstoppable advantage and how to position
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  yourself in a world that rewards mediocrity disguised as optimization. The ability to see beyond
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  quote-unquote best practices isn't just a competitive edge. It is the path to break through
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  performance and innovation that sets you apart in a culture that is addicted to incremental improvement.
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  This isn't about working harder. It's about seeing what everyone else missed.
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  Today, I'm going to hit you with a very uncomfortable truth. A truth about excellence,
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  and that excellence is never an accident, but also that you've been lied to about excellence
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  and how to achieve it. And most people that listen to this podcast, they are trying to figure out
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  how to become excellent, how to achieve mastery. They're trying to build a business. They're trying
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  to get that promotion. They're trying to be in the 1% or even 0.1% or 0.01% of their field. Because
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  humans crave mastery. They crave excellence. No one wakes up or very few people wake up and think,
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  wow, I hope I don't do well today. Wow, I hope I'm in the bottom percentile. That's not how we're
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  wired. We are wired for achievement, but sometimes it elutes us, and I'm going to tell you why,
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  because you have been told a lie about excellence. Everyone tells you that excellence is about grinding
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  harder, about perfecting systems, about optimizing what already exists. In my opinion, that's not
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  excellence. That's just the hamster wheel painted a different color. True excellence isn't about
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  running. The race better. It's about changing the track entirely. Richard Feynman, he didn't solve
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  impossible physics problems by working harder than other scientists. He invented a new visual
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  language, a simple stick figure diagram that looked like a child doodles, but solved what complex
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  equations couldn't. Feynman wasn't just a physicist. He was a Nobel Prize winner who helped
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  develop the atomic bomb on the Manhattan Project, and later became one of the most celebrated
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  scientific minds of the 20th century, and what made him extraordinary wasn't his intelligence,
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  but his completely different approach to problem solving. While his colleagues at Caltech and
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  Princeton, they buried themselves in these impenetrable mathematics, Feynman created a visual system
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  that made quantum mechanics intuitive, and these are called Feynman diagrams. They basically
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  revolutionized physics and are still used today, and they allow scientists to calculate what happens
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  when particles interact without drowning in pages of equations. Now, this is a perfect example.
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  Excellence doesn't play by the rules. Richard Feynman didn't play by the rules.
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  Excellence rewrites them. Now, there's a great quote by Aristotle. I love it.
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  Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort,
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  and intelligent execution. Now, he missed something there, though, because he nailed the
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  ingredients, but he missed the recipe. Excellence isn't just intentional. It's subversive.
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  It questions assumptions everyone else has already forgotten our assumptions, and that's where
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  the opportunity hides. Because I think almost everyone here who is trying to achieve excellence
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  is trapped in this invisible box, because your industry has best practices, established
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  methods, proven playbooks, and these aren't wrong. They're actually worse than wrong. They're
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  average. Every time you follow a best practice, you're guaranteeing mediocrity. By definition,
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  if everyone does it, it creates zero advantage. Excellence begins precisely where the best
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  practices and your competition lives inside this invisible box labeled how things are done.
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  They think they're being strategic by optimizing inside that box, but they're actually ensuring
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  their own mediocrity. And you can see it in how a lot of people think. Let's do what works,
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  but better. You've heard this before. That's just how our industry operates. We need to follow
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  established patterns. These thoughts aren't just harmless. They're excellence killers.
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  So the real question isn't how can I do this better than my competition. It's what if the
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  fundamental assumptions my competition believes are actually holding them back, and the difference
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  isn't just subtle. It's everything. And this mindset shift opens a door to the next level of your
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  potential. Now, I'm not going to say that this mindset shift is easy. It's painful. You can't
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  create excellence without first seeing reality clearly. And most people can't handle reality.
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  Most people build elaborate questions between themselves and the hard truths. And these questions
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  feel comfortable, but they make excellence impossible. Radalio, he understood this when he was
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  building Bridgewater Associates. Now the world's largest hedge fund. He created radical transparency
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  where the painful truths aren't just accepted, but they're actively hunted down. Employees call
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  out weaknesses. They challenge bosses directly. They ruthlessly dissect ideas looking for flaws.
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  Many very brilliant people cannot handle this and they quit. But those who stay consistently
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  outperform everyone else in the market. Now why? Because their excellence threshold is determined
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  by their truth threshold. Your capacity to achieve excellence is directly proportional to your
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  capacity to face uncomfortable realities. How often are you actively seeking feedback that makes
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  you cringe? How often do you say what needs to be said when silence would be a little bit easier?
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  That's not just your comfort zone boundary. That's your excellence ceiling. And raising that
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  ceiling requires a very simple but painful choice. You have to choose truth over comfort,
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  especially when nobody's watching. And here's what nobody tells you about true excellence. It rarely
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  comes from abundance. It really just emerges from strategic limitation. Let me explain. We are
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  conditioned to believe that more resources, more time, and more freedom naturally lead to better
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  outcomes. But the reality shows the opposite. An example is the Apollo 13 mission that turns
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  some potential disaster into NASA's finest achievement, not despite constraints, but because of them.
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  So when an oxygen tank exploded, engineers had to build a carbon dioxide filter using only what
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  the astronauts had available, duct tape, plastic bags, and a flight manual cover. Those limitations
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  forced to create a thinking that unlimited resources would have never prompted. So your constraints
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  aren't obstacles to excellence. They're the raw materials for it. What limitations in your
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  business or in your domain of expertise? Are you fighting that might actually be your greatest
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  potential advantage? The founder that's complaining about limited funding might be sitting on the
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  constraint that forces genuine innovation rather than some copy-paste solution. The creator,
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  who's frustrated by a small audience, might have the perfect conditions for developing truly
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  original work rather than playing to the crowd. Your path to excellence isn't about eliminating
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  constraints. It's about leveraging them deliberately. This is why scrappy startups can completely
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  disrupt existing industries. Because of constraints, they are forced to think differently. They are
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  forced to become excellent. But navigating this path, it requires holding two seemingly
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  opposite ideas in your mind at once. That's what makes this so fun. Because you must master the
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  existing rules while preparing to break them completely. That's what's so hard. Because most
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  people choose one path or the other. They either become obedient practitioners of conventional wisdom
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  or these arrogant disruptors who ignore the foundations. And then both paths lead to mediocrity.
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  True excellence emerges at the intersection of deep knowledge and radical reimagining. It's
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  not just philosophical, it's practical. Because if you think about your journey to excellence,
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  it follows a very interesting path, right? You have to master the fundamentals more deeply
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  than your peers. You have to identify the hidden assumptions within those fundamentals.
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  You have to challenge the assumptions that are most central to your field. And then you have to
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  create a new approach that makes the old one obsolete. And this is why true innovations, they rarely
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  come from complete outsiders or complete insiders. They come from people who are understanding the
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  system deeply enough to see exactly where it fails. So your next level isn't choosing between
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  tradition and disruption. It's using tradition as the launch pad for disruption. But even with
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  this knowledge, there's a more fundamental challenge that you're going to need to overcome.
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  Because the hardest part of excellence isn't talent or knowledge or resources. It's courage.
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  Not physical courage, but the social courage to be misunderstood. Often for extended periods of
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  time. Here's a great story that shows this. When Jeff Bezos outlined Amazon's strategy to prioritize
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  growth over profits, Wall Street called it Amazon.bomb and predicted immediate failure. For years, Bezos
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  was betrayed as delusional for investing in infrastructure instead of extracting quick profits.
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  But there's a very famous Bezos quote, this was his response. We are willing to be misunderstood
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  for long periods of time. That willingness to be temporarily misunderstood is necessary for
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  the eventual recognition that follows. Most people would rather be understood for their mediocrity
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  than misunderstood for their excellence. Because your comfort with criticism directly affects what
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  you can achieve. Every truly excellent idea will initially look wrong. It'll look excessive.
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  It'll look misguided to most people. How much social discomfort can you tolerate while pursuing
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  what you know is right? That's your excellence capacity and expanding that capacity might be the
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  single highest leverage investment you can make. But excellence isn't just about having the courage
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  to stand apart. It's also about understanding the nature of the journey itself because excellence
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  is not a fixed destination. It's this continuous process of improvement and it seems really
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  frustrating at first. Why would you pursue something that you can never fully achieve? But excellence
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  isn't about the arrival at some fantasy finish line. It's about who you become in the pursuit.
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  The Japanese concept of Kaizen embodies this perfectly. It's not about reaching some ideal
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  final state. It's about creating a perpetual gap between where you are and where you could be
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  and then continually closing that gap while knowing that it will never fully disappear.
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  Toyota didn't revolutionize manufacturing by reaching some end point. They built systems that
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  turned yesterday's excellence into today's baseline and then today's excellence into tomorrow's
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  minimum standard. In this orientation towards the unattainable, it changes how you make decisions.
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  So instead of asking, is this good enough? You start to ask, is this better than before? So the
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  standard isn't some fixed threshold. It's your previous best. So this is the approach that you
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  have to adopt for excellence. And this is very different than perfectionism, which is fear-based
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  and it stops progress. True excellence is this productive mindset that recognizes potential
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  improvements while still delivering your current best work. And it transforms how you approach
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  every aspect of your work. But to put this mindset into practice, you need some practical tools
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  to sort of cut through the noise, right? So to actually execute on this idea, I would say the one
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  question you have to ask yourself is what would this look like if I were excellent? And that's
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  going to encapsulate everything we spoke about, right? What would this look like if I were excellent
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  is speaking about the fact that you understand the existing status quo, but you're okay with
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  disrupting it? What would this look like if I were excellent is also saying that if I disrupt
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  the status quo and establish a new baseline, I'm not going to rest there, that's going to be
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  the new standard. And then I will have to improve upon that. Now, why is this question so important?
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  Because most of your life and most of your decisions happen on autopilot. You follow habits,
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  you follow industry norms, you follow all these established patterns without really much conscious
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  thought. And excellence requires you interrupting this autopilot. And that's the question that does
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  this. What would this look like if it were excellent? Not good, not competitive, not impressive,
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  not perfect, excellent. This question reframes decisions from what should I do to what could this
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  become? When Jiro Ono asked this about sushi, he didn't add more exotic ingredients. He stripped
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  everything back to basics, obsessing over rice temperature and fish quality in ways that a lot of
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  other chefs thought was excessive. But was a result a tiny restaurant in a subway station that earned
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  three Michelin stars and worldwide recognition? Ask this question about your product, your marketing,
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  your customer experience, your daily habits. The difference between your vision and your current
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  reality shows you where to improve. And closing that gap requires a fundamental recalculation of
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  risk. One that most people get completely wrong because most people believe excellence is inherently
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  riskier than mediocrity. After everything I told you, a lot of people would come to that conclusion,
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  I'm disrupting, I'm innovating, I'm doing things that have never been done before. Because after
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  all, shooting for average means fewer chances to fail dramatically. But this calculation misses
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  a crucial truth. The risk of excellence in mediocrity are fundamentally asymmetric. So the
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  downside of pursuing excellence is limited. What's the worst case? You fail and you end up with
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  something just merely good, but the downside of accepting mediocrity is unlimited because you
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  guarantee that you will never create something extraordinary. You will never be extraordinary.
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  So excellence has bounded risk, limited risk, an unbounded reward or unlimited reward.
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  Mediocrity has limited reward and unlimited risk. When Howard Schultz reimagined Starbucks
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  from a coffee bean retailer to a cafe experience, the company's bored at the time strongly
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  oppose this idea. He had to leave and start his own company, Il Giornali, to prove the concept
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  before eventually acquiring Starbucks and then implementing his vision. Had he failed, he would
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  have created a few nice coffee shops. But by succeeding, he transformed global coffee culture and
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  built a company worth over $100 billion. Most people asymmetrically overestimate the risks of
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  excellence while underestimating the risk of mediocrity. And this miscalculation leads to this
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  very tragic scenario where playing it safe becomes the riskiest strategy of all. So your next level
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  requires correcting this equation with your own decisions. But ultimately, all of these insights
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  really just come down to one fundamental truth about excellence. Excellence is not something that
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  happens to you. It's something you choose. And that choice rarely comes as this single dramatic
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  moment. It's made in all these small decisions that accumulate over time. The decision to question
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  an assumption when accepting it would be easier. The decision to start over when what you've created
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  is good but not excellent. The decision to maintain a standard even when no one else would notice
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  the difference. These decisions seem very small in isolation, but collectively they define the
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  difference between work that's forgotten and work that injures. And the gap between where you are
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  and excellence isn't a skill gap or a resource gap. It's a decision gap because you know what
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  excellence looks like. You just don't choose it when it costs too much. And as Aristotle reminds us,
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  excellence is never an accident. It's a choice. It's your choice. And that choice is available to
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  you right now in whatever you're working on. What will you choose today?