Welcome to Technally Short. You know us. I'm Sean. I'm Thomas. And today's episode is...
Oh, today's episode...
Qualities of Excellence. There we go.
Qualities of Excellence. This was, this is the third installment in our Excellence series called Perfectly Imperfect.
If you have not listened to the previous two episodes, first was Michaela Mosley, the next one was Josh...
Balog. I'm sorry. I know so many Josh's. Sorry, Josh.
It's Josh Balog. And both of those episodes were fantastic. And honestly, they both had different perspectives on Excellence.
And at the same time, they lined up with each other.
Absolutely.
And so now we're coming in here to also give, talk about it. Excellence, not from our perspective, yes, but from a different angle as well.
Absolutely.
And then our goal is to have, then we'll have next week, the idea is to have another guest on that you guys will be able to, that you guys will be able to get a lot from.
You guys will love this guest.
No spoilers though.
No spoilers.
Just expectations.
So, all right, Shawn. So why don't you take, why don't you start us off?
Okay. Well, for first, the definition of Excellence is the quality of being outstandingly good or extremely good.
So as we're about to dive deep into this, I'm going to tell you why Excellence is so important.
Okay. So with good Excellence, with Excellence period, because Excellence is good. I don't even have to say good Excellence. That sounds stupid.
With Excellence, you gain influence, it causes growth, and it changes others.
So should I dive into the qualities of Excellence?
Well, first I want to talk, I'll talk on, you gave that definition. I'm going to give John Maxwell's definition.
Yeah.
Because they do go hand in hand, but John Maxwell, I think he makes a lot of things more concise.
And Excellence is the gap between average and exceptional.
It's the ability to exceed expectations.
That's one of the qualities to exceed, the ability to exceed expectations and consistently deliver superior quality.
Because with Excellence, with everything that you do, there is a result of the things that you do.
The things that you do with Excellence, if you're striving for that Excellence, or as Michaela said in her episode,
that you strive to seek for what God's calling you to be excellent at, or what God's calling you to be excellent with in your ministry.
The ability to, sorry, the ability to exceed expectations and consistently deliver superior quality.
So what is that, so what could that superior quality be, right?
Yeah.
The superior quality of, like anything you do has a result.
So, and that result is either going to have a good or a bad quality.
True.
So it can, it's not black and white there. You can have, you know, whatever range you want to put on it.
But like it all, it's all determined by how well you do it.
Oh, the result, the result, this is something I learned from James Clear, then I'll let you go into your thing.
Yeah.
Into your, into the qualities that you have on there.
James Clear started reading with Andrew Regato, which you heard recently, which you were hearing on here a couple of times.
James Clear says, oh man, I just lost it.
Oh my gosh.
You weren't looking at it.
No, you're good.
Yeah.
Dang it.
Crap.
Oh, I'm going to cut this.
For a second guys. All right.
The qualities of excellence that I believe are needed for something to be excellent.
It requires honesty, humility, discipline, conviction, consistency, courage, love, sacrifice, and influence.
So to be excellent in my eyes, the only way you can ever be excellent, you have to be honest.
You have to be, you have to be, have humility because you have to be able to be like, okay, what do I need to work on?
What, what, what am I doing right?
What am I doing wrong?
But that takes a person who is humble and teachable actually.
I'll put teachable as well.
Consistency, you need to be consistent.
If you want to do anything excellent, it has to be consistent, disciplined.
You're going to have to say no to things that you don't want to say no to.
Because that's part of being excellent.
Conviction, you have to stand on what you believe or about what you're about to do or whatever product you're about to do or service or who you are.
Consistency has to be one of the most important qualities of excellence.
But courage too.
And you have to love whatever you're doing because if you love whatever you're doing or find love in it, then honestly the sacrifice for it means that much more.
And the influence you will, you will influence after everything is done when excellence is performed.
Influence naturally takes its course.
So those were the qualities I believe.
Yeah, that's good.
And you mentioned consistency there.
And that was something that John mentioned.
And also I remembered what James Clear says in his book.
The whole book is called Atomic Habits.
And John Maxwell talks about excellence as consistency, which means excellence is something you practice.
It's a habit.
That's a habit.
And James Clear said everything that you do, the results are lagged behind your habits.
So he gives some examples of like you lose weight.
You losing weight is a lagging result of going to the gym, of your habit of going to the gym and working out.
You having financial freedom is a lagging or a lack of financial freedom is the lagging result of your spending or financial habits.
So true.
So it's all about not just being consistent, but it's about being consistent in the right things.
So good.
It's being consistently excellent, which sounds like I say it out loud.
It sounds very daunting and it's not saying you have to be perfect.
That's not a criteria for excellence because if you expect to be perfect every time, you're going to disappoint yourself a lot.
But if you're consistently working on improving yourself and how can you intentionally grow,
because excellence, another thing that John Maxwell says about excellence is that it exceeds expectations.
You have the ability to exceed expectations.
Absolutely.
And sorry if I just made a hard pit that I feel like I did, but the thing is good.
But with and then he goes on to say, but you cannot exceed the expectations if you do not know what the expectations are.
So now we're talking about the qualities of excellence.
Yeah.
So the so I'm just going to say this real quick.
The so whenever you want to practice excellence in an area, you have to understand what the expectations are.
And if you don't know what the expectations are of yourself, maybe it's in your job, maybe it's in a volunteer position.
Maybe it's just maybe you want to be excellent with something that you're doing for yourself.
You want to be excellent at the gym. What are the expectations in those areas?
And how do you find those out?
And those answers can be different in many different ways.
But really what it comes down to is asking the right people.
True.
And it goes along with what you said as well, Shawn, about being teachable.
Yeah.
You wrote that down.
You thought about that as you were reading them out.
Because if you're not if you're not teachable, then there's so much wisdom around you that maybe you're not seeing.
But if you're not if you're not teachable, then you really just you probably think you already know all there is to know.
So good.
So and if you're if you're not so that means in my in my opinion, if you think you know all the things all the things that they're all to know, then you aren't excellent.
You aren't striving for excellence because there's nothing to strive for.
That's good.
So that's definitely good.
And you're 100 percent right.
I feel like what you said, Thomas, was so wise because, to be honest, if you're that goes back to what I was saying earlier, too, about being humility and having discipline, because it's like if you're not humble enough to know that I can be better,
then you obviously think you are the best already.
And exactly what you said, Thomas, if you if you think you're the best, you're not going to be excellent because excellence is growth.
Excellence is influence.
Excellence is sacrifice, consistency, courage, love, discipline and teachable.
Like you have to do all these things to equal one thing.
And that is excellence.
Another quality I just thought of.
Yeah.
Humbleness.
Good stuff.
And I got that whenever you said, what was that last quality you said?
My train of thought gets backtracked a lot.
Was it humility, discipline?
You said humility.
Well, humility, humbleness, I kind of go in the kind of go hand in hand.
Yeah.
But let's expand on that one.
Yeah.
Humbleness, like you said, like, oh, like you think if you think you're the best at everything or you think you're the best, then again, like you said, there's nothing to like we said before, like there's nothing to move up to.
There's no there's no area for growth if you already feel like you're at the top.
And a lot of times it was like we talked about we talked about leadership before on here.
Whenever you're at the top, typically you want to go back down to the bottom and help other people up.
Yeah.
And it's like it's where the Bible says the first shall be last and last shall be first.
So good.
And with excellence, like you're like, what are you going to be excellent in?
I think a lot of times excellence is whenever you start, you're like you start to serve.
Right.
And to those like that, that might not make sense to some like the sense to some people and like, or maybe that's not a little odd. Let me explain whatever what I mean by striving to serve or like first shall be last and last shall be first is like with your if you've already got it and you've accomplished these things, you've accomplished these things that you set out for.
You've accomplished some goals.
You've been striving for excellence.
You're continuously making yourself better.
What good is it if you're not giving that to others?
If you're not helping others understand how to do how to do the same, not saying you have to be a coach, not saying you have to be a team, not saying you have to be a coach, but like, but honestly, I believe people that strive for excellence inherently attract people to them.
Absolutely.
There'd be like, like, um, Maxwell mentioned, I don't think it was his hit his phrase, but he's mentioned becoming a people magnet in the people, people that become the people magnet are the people that are striving for the excellence and growing themselves every single day.
His excellence isn't just a one time process, and then you hit it's not that just a process. We start at zero and get to 100.
Right.
It's a daily thing you have to practice and it never stops.
I agree. Honestly, I feel like I love that zero to 100. I think I feel like when you go from range of excellence, it should be starting at zero, going to one, going to two, going to three.
And then at the end of your life, it should get to closest to 100 you can possibly get. I don't like that.
Like, you know, it's a constant process of saying, okay, what do I need to work on? Okay, how can I improve? Okay, how can I help others? Okay, what can I do to serve? Okay, how can I be a better leader? Okay, how can I bring others to be leaders?
Like, you know, it's a process of continuing and growing and growing and growing until the end. And then you're able to just when you're all done in life, a person who is excellent, brought others to be excellent leads others to be to lead others to lead others to excellency.
So like, it's like a generational wealth of excellency. So yeah, that's where I see. I love that knowledge you said zero to 100. Now, like, that's visual because I'm a very visual person. So my head, it just went like zero and then like starting today, and then try to tomorrow to be number one, you know, and just go to the next day and just try your best to keep improving in all the qualities that you that's why it's so important to be humble.
Like you said Thomas, because if you think you have it all, you will never grow. But if you know you don't have it all, you can grow in the areas that you're weak in.
Like this hit me when I like you said, like about it or like you should be close to 100, but you won't be at 100. Yeah. So what is 100? What's 100%? What? And I'm going to ask you like I'm asking you directly like as a listener, like what is what is 100% to you? What does that look like? Because it's the 100% your 100% could honestly be extreme and extreme undervalue.
You could be you could be thinking the 100% you're striving for is a lot more valuable than it actually is. And what as Christians, we believe 100 being 100% is being exactly like Jesus. Yes. Yes.
Close to God as we can be God. That's 100% and we can never be that right. We're never going to be that right. And but we strive on a daily basis to get closer to him. Yeah. To grow closer to him.
You need to be more excellent like he is. Absolutely. And I'm like I'm on fire right now because like this has been something like James Clear in his book again.
He talks about 1% gains and the whole concept of atomic habits is that it's the small minute things you do on daily basis that end up giving you this great amazing result.
And one in like if you think about it, he goes, if you do if you look through all of these things in your life, they might not even seem to be related, but you make it 1% gain every single day.
Not all of them, but not all of them every single day. But you make a 1% gain in some area of your life every single day.
And that's going to continuously add up at an exponential rate. And he has some graphs in his book. So what an exponential rate means, that means the line isn't straight. It's not linear.
It's not a linear path that you would expect. It actually grows on a curve. And it's also not a curve that you would expect. It's not like an up curve.
It's not like it starts at the bottom and slowly starts curving upwards and then you'll hit a peak. And then when you hit that peak, you'll start shooting up.
Oh, that's good. Like the band. Like if you know how bamboo grows, you know, bamboo grows, Sean. No, I have no idea.
Well, bamboo, it first thing it does years. It takes years. It'll grow a network. I think it takes years. Don't quote me. Well, now I've quoted, but it'll take a very long time.
It'll create a network of roots underground first. It'll create a network of widespread roots so we can get as much nutrients as possible for that one season where it will then take.
Man, I can't remember the time frame, but essentially within days, I think, weeks, days to weeks, it shoots up 90 feet.
It reminds me of that super bloom. Yep, exactly. That is like crazy to think about how God does stuff.
And it's like it's just it's growing its network. It's growing its network of roots. We're getting the nutrients. It's slowly doing this work that nobody sees.
And then one day it looks like that overnight success. And this isn't from me. This isn't from me. This I'm getting from other people. This stuff is wisdom I get from other people and I can just give it to others.
This is the point of the podcast. That's so good because that's almost like what God does to us. Right. It's the ones who have been working diligently without being seen, the ones working really hard behind the scenes and they're working really hard and they have a humble heart and their consistency and they're sacrificing their time.
And they're becoming a wonderful leader. And honestly, those are the same people who always become excellent. Yeah, it's behind the scenes. I love how you said it's they're on the they're developing the roots for a very long time.
And then the foundation and it boom, all that consistency eventually pays off all that hard work eventually pays off all that sacrifice and eventually pays off. And that is so good. Thomas. I love that. Honestly, like it shoots up.
There's this thing called a super bloom. We were just on a super bloom fast. I'd say like two or three weeks ago. Yeah. And so we fasted for seven days. And the reason why we did that is because there's a super bloom.
What a super bloom is, is areas like California and other desert areas. There's seeds in the ground, a whole bunch of them, but they don't grow. And then all of a sudden, they were just they all bloom at the same exact time.
That's what a super bloom is. Like they weren't growing. But then all of a sudden, they all grow at the same time. So it's like they were just there. But in the process of all of them being there, when nobody was knowing was they were about to do something that exceeded expectation.
And that's the bloom all at the same time. That's good. That's really good. I think that's going to I think that's the I wanted to pause there for a second because I feel like there's some people need to process because I feel like.
Yeah, let's move off of that because that's a part because I feel like we've said a lot. But I was reading off your list. I have written down and you have written down conviction. Yeah.
I mean convicted, not convicted, but having conviction. Yeah. That's another quality of excellence. So expand on that a little bit.
Okay, for all to be excellent. It's like some of the future episodes. I mean, I'm not future episodes. Past episodes we talked about like healthy rejection. Yeah, there's some times where something can even be good that you have to say no to.
But for the bad stuff, you definitely have to say no to. So like that will destroy your extenstiy. For instance, see like if you're trying to make up if you're trying to make a million dollars, then the best way you can make a million dollars is to increase your money.
Right. So what would decrease your money that you would need to eliminate would be the conviction. Like it'd be like, okay, I cannot be spending unwisely because I'm trying to make a million dollars. Yeah. If that was their scenario.
Right. So you're not going to go out there and buy ridiculous amount of cars with ridiculous interest rates or buy a house that you can't afford yet. If you're trying to make a million.
If you say, okay, I just want these things and you let your desires overcome your if you let your desires overcome your vision. Yeah, then you will destroy excellency.
So like if you let your like my one of my favorite quotes from my mentor say don't trade your your bowl of soup for your blessing. Right. So like in the Bible, Esau, God had given him. He was first born. So he gets the birthright, which is the blessing, which means you get to inherit all this stuff when your your parents and stuff pass away. Right.
So it's it's everything you get the blessing of God and you get not only do you get God's blessing, but you get all the stuff that you're about to inherit from family. Right. So that's how the birthright works.
Esau was hungry one day and his brother Jacob, which Jacob means to see if his brother Jacob knew that but he did. He saw was out there hardly, hardly working and he didn't give himself time to rest. And so he's hungry. And when you're hungry, you make some crazy decisions to the food for the feed your desire.
Right. So he's hungry. And in this analogy and in this story, Jacob goes to his brother and says, I'll cook you some eat. But you got to give me this birthright. And he saw was like, man, I'll give you my birthright. I'm just hungry. Just give me something to eat.
And in reality, we do this so often in life. We we trade our desires instead of getting our vision. Right. Like what we want to do our life, our purpose, our goal or or thing that will make us excellent.
We will trade that for something temporary. And conviction says, no, I cannot do that. A person who who has conviction says, I'm not doing that, regardless.
Right. That's good. I think like it goes again back to James Clear. He talks about the opposite, essentially, of the good habits where you if you're if you're making good choices every single day.
But if you're in it, it's just as hard as it is to create a new habit. It's just as hard to break an old one. And it's not harder to break an old habit. I would say they're about the same to.
Well, no, I say it's harder to break a habit than to start a new one.
We get so hot. And that's maybe my opinion. They might be they might be close to the same. But the but if you continuously go down the path of the bad habits, it's exponentially growing.
You're going to like from that, you know, maybe you maybe you start a little bit higher than zero. But but you can continuously do that negative one percent loss instead of a one percent gain every single day. You will get as close to zero as you can get.
That's so true. So like if you think about it from that perspective, like what are like I'm going to ask you guys another question.
What are the habits in your life that are hurting you? What are the habits that are the good habits that you could start that would help you strive for excellence and seek excellence out?
And another thing you mentioned, Sean, you mentioned desire. Yeah. And you mentioned you mentioned it in a way where and you're not wrong with what you said.
You mentioned in the way you make make it sound like desires bad. Yeah. Which is not. It's not. So the starting this is another quote, an actual quote this time from Napoleon Hill from Thinking Grow Rich.
He goes, the starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this consistently in mind. Weak desire brings weak results. Just as a small fire makes a small amount of heat.
It's really good. And so what he's saying there is it's not. And I believe this is another quality of achievement, another quality of excellence is having a particular desire to be to be excellent.
Having this and not just to be excellent, but being defined, being defined in your like what what do you want to be excellent in? Why do you want to be excellent in it? And then how are you how are you going? How? What? What routines? What habits are you going to instill in yourself to be able to do that?
All that is driven by that desire. Yeah. Where there's no desire, where there's no desire, there's like you said, like if there's if it's just a small flame, there's not much, there's not much going on. But if you if you have a strong desire, one that you feel like you can't live without, that you feel like, man, I got to, I got to grow here.
I got I got to grow here. I got to seek this out. I have to talk to these people. I have to start these new routines in order to get to that point in the future that I'm visualizing that vision that I have for my life.
That's so good. And like I'm going to share my like right now, I feel like my right now, my vision, I was thinking about this earlier this morning, actually, it popped up in my head is like, because I talk about my vision a lot about like, what's my like, I never really thought about the vision for my life as a whole.
This morning, it popped up, like God gave it to me, like it popped in my head, because I talk about it with my production, I shouldn't say my, it's not my team. I talk about it with the production team that I lead for Inspire Colleges at our church and amplify.
And I tell them the vision for the team is for them to essentially not need me. But really what it is, and like, that's true, but like to it's I thought about it, it's like, well, let's make that more defined, what does that really mean?
For them not to need me means that they actually exceed me. That's good. And that they're like, even if I'm not there, they're still a solid team. And that each one of those people there, each one of those people there, like I'm able to pour into is then able to go out and could lead other teams, have the ability to lead more teams and grow more.
And I plant seeds in them and they plant seeds and they plant seeds in others. Not, and of course, I don't expect that the only seeds are planted, the only seeds are planting are because of me. That's ridiculous.
But the, but I do believe there are things that I can still as a leader in people that in the people I lead and the people around me that then they that that will just take root in them, cut fruit, and then cause more seed.
That's good. And that's the vision for my life is to be continuously growing so I continuously grow can continuously grow others. And I have to be first. That's where a leader leaders first. Like, so like, that's where the last first shopping last and last shopping first.
That's so true. And good for the leaders go leaders go first and then put others above them. Yeah, that that's where it comes down to. And I feel like you said, I want to think I love that you just said recently was that you want as a leader, you want to be the leader.
You want to be that your people you're leading under you to become better than you. Yeah, that's the goal of a leader. Like if you think about like Moses right. Moses was amazingly. What happens when Moses passes away.
Most of the single promise land but Joshua did you know yeah, and when Moses with with God, and then Moses left the area. Joshua would linger later he Joshua became a better leader, because he had an excellent leader. Yeah, you know, so like, it comes down to leading with excellence will cause other people to have excellence, you know, and the people who have excellence under you will lead other people to excellence and it's just a
a like I said like a generation of wealth. Right. And I'm going to say this, then we can wrap it up. Yeah.
Um, Moses wasn't perfect either. Yeah, right. He wasn't he was he was he was an excellent leader but he was not a perfect leader. Yeah, he may not. That's why he didn't get to go to the promised land. Yeah, he messed up and God was like, sorry, man. Yeah. I promise you this but you broke you you broke the path you broke you broke you broke the covenant. Yeah.
But yeah, so with that said, the wrap up, we can just wrap up quickly by saying the qualities that we've talked about wrapping up I talked about just saying the qualities that we talked about. Okay.
First of all, one quality that is not of excellence is perfection. Yeah. But why don't you read off your list again. Okay qualities of excellence, discipline, conviction, honesty, humility, sacrifice, influence, teachable, humble, and leader.
Yeah. And guys, if you if you like this episode, definitely share it out on all of your social medias. Absolutely five stars give us a five star review. And, guys, we love you. See you next time. Love you guys.