Revisiting Excellence
Performance vs. Self Esteem
Philosophers,
Today’s post will be a little different than is typical—at least in terms of formatting.
My writing schedule has been sporadic over the summer so I have found myself reading through old, half-finished notes and essays in order to re-ground and re-inspire myself. I’m excited about transitioning from an active Summer into a reflective Fall.
I dug up this essay below I had typed into my phone about a year ago. Instead of forcing it into our typical 5 section format, I decided to invest my energy into an edit.
I hope you enjoy perusing the thoughts below, and would love to hear your experience with these words. I’m not sure I’d stand by these thoughts as fact—it’s much closer to prose than philosophy—but it felt good to pen and process.
The full article and comments are open to everyone.
Enjoy!
Part I
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly.” —Aristotle
Said simply in gyms, offices, and classrooms across the world, “Excellence is a habit.”
This is a common approach to the world of virtue, ethics, and personal development. It’s the attempt to reverse engineer one’s life—like components of a wrist watch—to tick in synch with the eternal value that is excellence, that is acting rightly.
In fact, how we define excellence is largely the point of this philosophical exercise. In the western world we primarily define it based on the work of teachers like Plato, the Stoics, St. Augustine and others who built the western world of thought.
More often than not, this strain of thinking tends to be reductive, mechanistic, and misses an important aspect of what it is to be human—our psychology, our inherent irrationality and emotion, our need to connect in messy and vulnerable ways.
In many ways, the definition of excellence in western philosophy is decidedly external.
Excellence is being good at your craft or job. Being a great athlete. Getting into shape or losing weight. Achieving financial or material goals. Spending “more time” in pursuit of the spiritual or relational—however one might define that.
But, what if there is also another way? Another way of evaluation oneself and defining excellence?
Lately, I have to come to identify more with psychological study, proven time and time again in clinical offices across the world on a daily basis:
“Healthy self-esteem is essentially internal. It is the capacity to cherish oneself in the face of one’s own imperfections, not because of what one has or what one does.” - Psychologist Terry Real
To put it another way, perhaps true excellence is less about being perfect and more about accepting all of our parts—even those we deem imperfect.
And what if the work isn’t to fix the parts we don’t like as much as it is to understand why we hold those judgements about ourselves in the first place.
Epictetus once said,
We suffer not from the events in our lives, but from our judgment about them.
Seen in this light, the pursuit of excellence (defined as states of external achievement) could very well set us up for suffering.
We create a judgement about excellence (it will always be a judgement after all because there is no universal standard of excellence) which then becomes a benchmark against which to measure ourselves.
Self-esteem then is the work of exploring inner excellence not as something to be achieved, but a process to enjoy. It’s a way to set goals against desires and enjoy the journey along the way.
And the first path of that journey is genuine acceptance of ourselves, our situation, and all of the things we like and do not like about ourselves and our choices.
It all belongs.
When we discover that we are basically a good person with genuine and pure motives, we are firmly rooted in our own selves and capable of becoming the most excellent version of ourselves we can imagine.
Part II
So how does one walk the path of inner excellence?
This is the path of the sage and spiritual seeker.
Along this path we stumble upon what I have come to call the problem of groundlessness.
I believe that these sources of external validation—be it religious values, family sayings, political affiliations, cultural icons, philosophies, and dogmas are all grounding.
They are essential for much of our lives.
But the journey of the sage leads into what the mythologists call the underworld. And in the underworld there is no ground.
There is no right or wrong. Good or bad. Moral or immoral.
There only is.
Existence without judgement.
And the sage is found in this ambivalent and agnostic isness.
We all experience this groundlessness at some point(s) in our lives. Most often in the throws of grief. Suffering is a part of life, regardless of who you are.
The loss of a dream, a friend, a partner, health. We all find ourselves thrust into the groundless randomness of life.
But it is here we have essentially two choices—I believe there are two types of sages.
Neither path is better than the other. Neither right, neither wrong.
The first path is the path of resistance.
The first path is to wrestle with and make sense of the groundlessness. These people fight against the ambiguity of our existence, and wrangle the big questions of life into submission.
They are disciplined, tough, experienced warriors who fight to relieve the suffering of the world and within themselves, they conquer their fear, and stand for virtue and nobility.
I will call this the path of the warrior-sage.
The second path follows another route.
This is the path of the disappeared. The path of curiosity. The path of possibility and openness.
This is not a path for the ascetic or monk, pastor or prophet. This is the path for the working class scoundrel seeking to accept their devil and their god.
This is the path of the one who says, “I am here to ask a question of life, or perhaps life is asking a question through me.”
It’s for the one who is capable of imposing their own principles upon our strange existence, without needing proof or evidence of their correctness. For the one whose principles change, because hell, they could be wrong—or worse, unhelpful.
If this path had a job description it might read, “is comfortable in ambiguous environments.”
Essentially, this path belongs to the people who embrace, accept, and explore the groundless, amoral reality of our lives.
Instead of relieving suffering, they observe it.
Instead of judging outcomes, they study them.
Instead of creating suffering by their judgements, they absorb chaos in their stillness.
They are students of their random, small place in the universe, and their discoveries are shatteringly simple, and painfully profound.
This is the path of the philosopher-sage.
The philosopher-sage learns that non-doing is often the most important (and most difficult action) one can take.
In Herman Hesse’s epic novel Siddhartha, the main character begins his life as a prominent religious cleric, the son of a noble family.
Distraught over the superficiality of religion, he seeks spirituality. He even meets the Buda, only to be let down at his ordinariness.
Frustrated by the purposelessness of monks and ascetics, he seeks the path of materialism, accumulating a massive fortune and generational wealth. He meets someone whom he loves deeply and they live together, in deep passion for the other among their mansions and servants.
Broken over the lack of purpose his business ventures have brought him, he flees in despair, squandering his wealth intentionally destroying his reputation.
He comes to a simple ferryman—whose life has been dedicated to the pursuit of moving people from one side of the river to the other.
So ordinary in his existence many travelers hardly notice him at all, and yet their journey is impossible without his service.
He finds himself unable to cross the river because he has squandered his fortune and cannot even pay the toll.
He offers his services to the ferryman and becomes the old man’s apprentice.
While he waits, his lover appears, unable to recognize the simple ferryman he has become.
She is ill and is seeking safety for her son—his son.
She passes away in front of his eyes, and he finds himself a single parent, living off the simple wages of a ferryman.
And for the first time in his life he discovers something—the very thing he sought his whole life which eluded him no matter how he tried.
It appears to him as happiness and contentment, a state he comes to recognize as enlightenment.
The simple state he recognizes now as the state present in the Buda he had met years before.
In accepting the simple ambiguity, even purposelessness of the states of his existence, he finds what we all long for whether conscious or not—contentment, happiness, connection, purpose, and autonomy.
It’s the journey of stillness, of observation, of non-doing.
I think if we are lucky enough to realize we are in a phase of groundlessness, we will find ourselves taking both paths at different junctures.
I see many warrior-sage journeys—in books, movies, on social media.
But it’s hard to recognize the obscurity of the philosopher-sage.
But if you pay attention, you just might see it, maybe even in yourself.
Until next time,
Matt
I think I'm both!