On excellence

Excellence is not attained by an obsession with how "better" you are than others. It is not about status seeking. It is, foremost, about besting yourself — without compromising on your values.

There are two kinds of striving, and they get conflated often.

Comparative excellence measures you against others: rank, status, being "the best." It's externally referenced, so it's inherently unstable. There is always someone ahead of you, and the goalposts move with the field.

Self-referential excellence measures today against yesterday — this work against your last attempt, your conduct against your own standards. It's stable because the reference point is internal, and always available to you.

The values clause matters most. Without it, "besting yourself" can slide into pure optimisation — cutting corners, treating people as instruments, sacrificing integrity for output. Add "without compromising on your values," and the bar changes. It's no longer just did I improve? It becomes did I improve in a way I can stand behind? That is what separates excellence from mere achievement.

Aristotle said something close to this: arete isn't winning a contest — it's a thing functioning well according to its own nature. A knife being sharp. A person acting in line with reason and virtue. The comparison, if there is one, is between the thing and its own potential — not between the thing and some other thing.

The Hindu tradition frames it differently but arrives close by. The Bhagavad Gita speaks of svadharma — one's own duty, one's own nature-given path — and holds that it is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at another's. Excellence, here, isn't measured against a universal ranking either; it's measured against fidelity to what is truly yours to do. The Gita adds something Aristotle doesn't dwell on: act well, but release your grip on the outcome.

Excellence lives in the quality of the effort, not in the comparison of results.

The Japanese tradition expresses it through practice rather than doctrine. Kaizen — "change for the better" — treats excellence not as a summit you reach, but as continuous, almost imperceptible improvement, day after day. Close to it, the ideal of the shokunin — the craftsman who devotes an entire life to a single trade — carries the sense that a moral and aesthetic duty accompanies work done well: refining your movement not to surpass others, but out of obligation to the craft itself, and to those who will receive the work. The sushi master Jiro Ono, still repeating his movements after decades, embodies this: you never arrive, you only keep drawing closer.

The Islamic tradition names this too, and perhaps more precisely. Ihsan — often translated "excellence," or "doing what is beautiful" — is defined in a well-known hadith as worshipping as though you see God, and if you do not see Him, knowing that He sees you. Set aside the theology and the structure remains: the standard for your conduct is something constant and unseen, not an audience. Which means the quality of the work can never depend on who's watching.

That, in the end, is the whole idea. Four traditions, four vocabularies, one claim: excellence held to a standard no one else can see.