Recently I’ve read the following, Adam Grant quote:
If you judge your worth by your achievements, you feel worthless whenever you fall short of a goal.
Stable self-confidence comes from learning to separate your performance from your self-esteem.
Excellence is a reflection of effort, skill, and luck-not your value as a person.
Very interesting. It made me think….
So this means excellence is a measurable standard. Then we can reach this goal by combining the different percentages of effort, skills and luck. Right? And it is only about performance, no personal values involved, as far as I’ve understood.
Trying to apply this theory to myself, as I’m not a lucky girl, I could reach the excellence “playing” with my skills and effort “only”.
So far I should have reached a fairly good level of excellence working less, being my skills increased even by experience. This sounds pretty good if it only were true. What really happened is that I think I’m working harder than before. Where did I go wrong? What would Pareto say? What is the best combination of percentages to get the optimized solution? 80/20, right?
Is this really the priority? Is this really so rational? What if my only care is being an excellent human being? Could I perform this the same way? Well, I think the same theory is applicable only if we put our personal values among the required skills and…keep working hard. No excuses. My granny would say “There’s nothing valuable you can achieve without hard work”.
When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
John Ruskin