“Don’t focus on excelling at the expense of persevering.”
– A paraphrase of Dr. Andy Hamilton, President, NYU in his welcome address to the Spring admit Class of 2022 last night in New York
New York University’s motto is the Latin for “To persevere and to excel.”
As we run The Eldest of The Three through the move-in / orientation process — it was a lesson that registered for her, and also for me, and the other business-type dads in the room.
In science, we fail often and with some degree of regularity. In research, the hypothesis we’re trying to prove must first face unrelenting efforts to disprove it. And, in business, if all we’re doing is focusing on excelling at what we do — we may not get the opportunity to persevere should a competitor shift the market or a regulator affect the business model.
Perseverance is the stuff of Difference Makers, largely because there is rarely and end to the work we do. We may excel at a project, but still need to persevere through the bigger work effort. We may excel at a presentation, but still need to persevere through the negotiations. We may excel at saving a client, but still need to persevere to change the process or root cause of what made the client consider leaving.
Our schools, our sports media, our pundits focus on excelling (not excellence, in my opinion — they choose instead to glorify the test over the learning, the game over the season or the highlight over the game and the legislation over the problem it was seeking to solve.
Perseverance is about the longer haul, and when we’re measuring our progress, keeping a laser focus on the longer, bigger, broader goal, perseverance will win out over excellence, and it will do so even faster when we get the excellence right more frequently along the way.
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