In life, we all have a taste for excellence and mastery. It’s as though the most true things are embodied through practicing excellence and mastery. However, the journey to the place where one has elegantly embodied excellence and mastery is challenging. In a recent conversation I had with Stephen Musoke Senkomago (a.k.a SMS), we explored this theme and learned a few things.
The journey starts from one’s village. Now, this is not the village of the me’s but rather the actual village where one practices their life. They say it takes a village to raise a child. This is true because there are many ways to embody excellence, and if you want to give your child a chance to learn as many skills as possible, you need a larger sample. So, their family and close relatives are not enough. You need more masters of excellence so that the child can get a chance to resonate with what they feel called to. This village becomes their ground, their point of incidence into the world.
All villages have cultures and traditions. These are the tenets that they identify with. As a member of that club/village, you have to be well acquainted with them, for they have shaped your life appetites and default perspectives. There’s a reason you think the way you do, and part of what influenced this is your culture and traditions. Recognizing and leveraging the values and lessons inherited from our cultural background is crucial in establishing a solid sense of self. Once this foundation is set and our goals align with our deepest values, we are good to go on the journey toward excellence.
At this point, we have to grapple with the challenge of the pursuit of perfection. This endeavour traps in analysis paralysis and blocks us from taking the first steps. It’s essential to remember that perfection is an endpoint, a state of completion that, in the dynamic flow of life, is practically unattainable. As I like to say, the perfect people are dead because they can no longer be improved. Perfection implies that there’s no more opportunity for improvement. however, in an ever changing world, there’s always room for improvement. So, maybe it’s better to aim at perfection but not try to be perfect. Perfect can be a very good ideal to rise up to however, we should not let ourselves be locked into that tunnel vision of it as the only thing. Before ascending to perfection, we have to get good at navigating the mundane for life happens in the mundane.
The mundane is the boring, repetitive things in our daily lives. How we go about the day-to-day tasks reflects how well we embody excellence and what we have mastery over. When you look at it from this level, you can quickly see how perfection looks like an impossibility. There are many things we are not good at, and these are what hold us back from starting in many cases. However, another way to look at this would be as opportunities. On the journey to achieving excellence, we must change into the person who can reach the destination. What this means is that we have to achieve excellence in all the small opportunities available to us along the way, and those will lead us there.
As we develop excellence and mastery in the small daily endeavours we unlock flow. It’s a positive feedback loop that’s meant to guide us towards a more refined version of excellence. This process of fine-tuning draws us closer to our optimal state, bringing with it a sense of stability and predictability that we naturally crave. This new way of being not only enhances our sensitivity to potential disruptions but also enables us to identify and integrate practices that foster stability into our lives.
In this new way of being, we develop sensitivity for the things that would rid us of this way of being. We start to track meaning and authenticity. We notice how we maintain our new found normalcy while getting better every day. With time, consistency in our efforts beings to compound, and we put redundancies in place to protect us if anything happens that could rob us of the excellence and mastery we have gathered. We now have a more heightened sensitivity to the details of the changes happening in us and around us to a level that we are always working hard to fine-tune our skills of integrating the change.
Continuous integration becomes a life skill in itself as we identify the appropriate stance from which we can solve the most problems. We develop the intellect of a key logger who is able to identify the key log that unlocks the log pile and allows the river to keep flowing. We get in the flow of our reality and now know how to work with it to address the unnecessary suffering that’s always arising while increasing the efficiency generated.
This journey to excellence and mastery is long and arduous. It lasts a lifetime or more and requires multiple sacrifices and transformations along the way. However, at the end of the journey, it guides you to the place where you ought to be—the place you always wanted to be. Through dedication to the small daily tasks, acknowledgment of our cultural roots, and a willingness to embrace change, we pave the way for a life of excellence and mastery, a legacy that transcends the ordinary and inspires others to embark on their own journeys towards greatness.
