Late Night Musings: Choosing to Be Our Very Best

in #excellence5 years ago

When I was a kid, one of the values I was raised with was to always do my best. My father always insisted that "if something is worth doing, it's worth doing WELL."

He wasn't necessarily suggesting that we should be obsessive about excellence, nor that we should not attempt to do things we might not excel at. His point was that when we decide to do something well, there is a certain "pride of creation" that shines through in whatever it is we are undertaking.

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Strange alien vegetation? Nope... a macro shot of one of our exotic hydrageas

Of course, he also tended to be quite vocally loud in expressing his disgust for what he considered slovenly workmanship.

You may have noticed the effect of being the best you can, yourself, in art, crafts, writing, performing and other forms of creativity. A piece of work — even if it is fairly simple — exudes a certain "quality" when its maker was attempting to do their very best... not in a "global" sense, but in the context of their particular skill level, at that moment.

A long time ago, I remember watching my neighbor build a rock retaining wall from large round river rocks, collected from our nearby creek.

He took a long time to build that wall, and took a great deal of care in selecting each rock — some of them weighing several hundred pounds — and making sure it fit "just so" into the wall. He'd actually never built a stone wall before, but at the end his efforts resulted in a wall that looked like it had been built by a master stonemason.

We can even see it here on this web site, when we look at what has been posted.

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Rare white lavender in our garden, last summer

There are people here who may not be the greatest writers, or they are writing in English even though it is not their first language, but their contributions are still presented really well, with nice illustrations, proper formatting and spell checked.

Meanwhile, others — who may have a superior command of language — sometimes produce "slop" that shows they don't care about how their work "represents."

Raw talent may be something we are born with — or not — but making the most of whatever talent we do have is a choice we all have.

So choose wisely. Choose to be your very best.

Thanks for reading!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!

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Created at 190107 00:20 PST

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This is such an important idea to always keep in mind and one that I try to keep in the forefront of mine. As a musician, I see many good musicians start to take less and less pride and ownership in their work. Often it begins when they do a job that they consider beneath them, and the rot quickly spreads to all aspects of their art... It is sad to see, and the only way to avoid it is to take own no and pride in everything you do, even if it isn't the most perfect thing that you ideally wanted.

Of course, there's the additional wrinkle in our highly competitive world that sometimes "our best" isn't actually good enough to get the desired results on a larger scale. But — at least for me — that's still not reason for me not to try doing my best.

Exactly, once you stop owning or taking pride in your work/art/music, you stop being at your best. It's something to stay on guard for!

Well said. My Dad also had this approach.

Posted using Partiko Android

That is one thing I’ve always noticed when putting in extra effort into things. Often time’s people don’t even put in their average effort they just do the bare minimum. It create such wide gap you would have thought one person spent ten times as much time as other. In reality not so much. Being lazy can sure come at a price if others put in just a little more effort.

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