The Pursuit of Excellence

How to stand out in a world obsessed with scale

What makes one experience good and another great? Why does one product gain thousands of users within months while others linger unnoticed or lose momentum? Why does one community capture people's hearts while another project barely gets noticed? Is there a formula for being exceptional, creating things that stand out, being in demand, and building things that are ‘sticky’? 

There’s an art and science to this that we need to unpack if we want to make an impact in the world. Whether you’re building a business or a movement, trying to achieve product/market fit, or creating a public art exhibition, it’s important to understand how to resonate with those whose attention, trust, support, and commitment we hope to gain. 

We know when we’re experiencing something or someone exceptional. It’s obvious, visceral, and unassailable. The outlier may feel indifferent or uninspired, but excellence is generally hard to deny. Similarly, we’re also good at spotting mediocrity. It’s lazy, boring, and predictable, and it fails to affect us in a meaningful way. When there’s a lack of skill, effort, or care, it shows in the outcome.

Whether something is good, great, or exceptional might feel subjective, but there’s a tipping point near both extremes where feedback or responses converge. It’s a point where we move beyond subjectivity—where most people can agree that something isn’t great or is truly extraordinary. I’m less interested in the gray area in the middle and more curious about those clear moments of consensus on either side of the spectrum, specifically where the majority can agree on excellence. 

Excellence is the culmination and result of vision, intention, focus, and discipline. Sometimes, it’s influenced by resources (time, money, etc.), but not always. We’ve all had experiences and encounters where an overflow of resources has had the opposite effect—throwing money at things doesn’t necessarily contribute to their greatness. True excellence emerges from a profound depth. It’s shaped through meticulous attention to detail, ingenuity, care, clarity, creativity, and refined taste. Not to mention raw or nurtured talent that’s impossible to deny. 

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and studying people, experiences, and products to see if they share anything in common when they resonate. A good example is my yoga and pilates studio, Chi Junky, which offers a variety of classes with different instructors teaching throughout the week. I’ve been a regular for about 2 years now and have enough data to confidently comment on why some classes perform better than others. One class, in particular, stands out—always packed, always in demand. It’s led by the studio’s owner, Rachelle, and typically takes place on Saturday or Sunday mornings. But it’s not just the full room that makes her classes exceptional—it’s the experience itself. I can feel and hear it in the feedback from others, and the consistently crowded space speaks for itself. So, what is it about Rachelle’s classes that make them coveted? Why do people keep coming back?

Weekend morning classes are always popular, but Rachelle’s classes stand out for more than just their timing. As the owner and a long-time teacher at the studio, she’s well-known and respected, which likely draws people in. But it’s her leadership that sets her apart. Rachelle is an expert, and it’s obvious. She knows what she’s doing, she’s incredibly confident, and she delivers without a hint of ambiguity or hesitation. But more than that, the experience she creates is undeniably powerful. Her instructions are clear and easy to follow. She turns the music up loud enough that you can’t hear the voice in your head but not so loud that it’s overwhelming. The moves are challenging enough to keep you engaged but not so challenging that you struggle to do them. This leads to complete presence and focus, ultimately getting people into a flow state. 

Exceptional experiences help us be more present and feel more connected to ourselves, each other, and the world. 

Exceptional art creates a sense of awe and wonder. It moves us emotionally and helps us feel things we may not have felt otherwise. 

Exceptional products keep us coming back. They’re innovative, intuitive and seamless. They clearly solve a problem or meet a need. 

Exceptional content is engaging and thought-provoking. It inspires, educates, motivates, and helps expand our thinking. 

Exceptional leaders are authentic. They’re super communicators who are consistent, confident, compassionate, and grounded in purpose. 

Exceptional cars, exceptional food, exceptional travel. I could go on. In every industry, vertical, niche, genre, and role, there is a standard that we’ve collectively unconsciously agreed on that feeds into why we recognize, gravitate toward, celebrate, and aspire to excellence. While what is considered excellent in America might be different from what is valued in Japan, globalization and shared access to technology and media have shaped an emerging and evolving cross-cultural benchmark.

This is good and bad because the pursuit of excellence can intersect with the pursuit of progress, often making us competitive and leading to all kinds of problems. But I won’t get into that in this essay, as I want to focus on how we might design for and achieve excellence in our domain without the desire or need to win or to be more or better. Let’s call this ‘pure excellence.’ 

We need to differentiate excellence from perfection. Perfection is the pursuit of an impossible ideal heavily influenced by white supremacy. Perfectionism holds us and others to unrealistic standards and, as a result, fails to centre the well-being of individuals or groups. Excellence is not perfectionism. Although the results may look and feel the same, we may describe an excellent work of art as ‘immaculate’ or ‘flawless’; however, the approach and process to produce that work are entirely different. While perfectionism struggles, controls, and constrains creativity, excellence observes, explores, and allows. What they share in common is a deep desire to reach the highest possible outcome. Where they differ in their approach to the process.

Perfection is never good enough. Excellence is incrementally better with each iteration. Excellence takes time, practice, and devotion. Perfection is impatient, entitled, and rigid. Excellence is achieved through deep presence and commitment to the process. Perfection is never achieved because it’s rooted in fear of failure. And fear of failure prevents us from trying, or trying again, and again, and again. In Naval Ravikant’s words, “it’s not 10,000 hours that creates outliers, but 10,000 iterations.” 

The pursuit of perfection feels painful. The pursuit of excellence feels expansive. One helps us grow, while the other stifles our growth. 

As a young entrepreneur and artist, I didn’t understand the nuanced differences between perfection and excellence. I always knew I had a unique ability to see the highest potential of something, but the process of getting there with some level of ease was a capacity I had to learn and cultivate. Over the years, and after many failures, I’ve developed a compass that allows me to understand my motivations for achievement. This compass has also enabled me to understand others better and discern whether the process we are embarking on is centring genuine purpose and care or misplaced desire and ambition. 

It is far more interesting to pursue excellence than to pursue success. I’d argue that success results from being exceptional and birthing remarkable things into the world. But this pursuit has a cost, as with all of life’s pursuits. It guarantees that we’ll look like fools, often in public. Most people are unwilling to go on this journey or perhaps can’t afford to. But there are no shortcuts. Even those born with rare talent and intense clarity spend decades improving their discipline or building version after version of an offering. Nothing and no one reaches excellence by accident. 

Whether in startup land or the arts, individuals and groups are working tirelessly to bring things into the world that matter. While we may be driven by different things (impact, relationships, status, growth, wealth, fame, legacy, etc.), we want and need our work, products, and content to reach its intended audience and objective. Even if the desired outcome is to compose a masterpiece that moves an audience of one, excellence is the surest path to getting there. Excellence requires authenticity, which is the most resonant force in the universe. 

At its best and purest form, the desire for excellence is rooted in deep curiosity and appreciation for creation, innovation, and impeccable design. Those driven by pure excellence have no greater inspiration and teacher than nature—the forests, the oceans, the galaxies. Their benchmarks don’t come from their intrinsic motivations, religious ideology, social programming, capitalistic ideals or the constructs of the material world. 

Pure excellence can only be found in the natural world. Anything human-made, even in collaboration with nature, is merely a reflection, a reproduction, an interpretation of what reality has already produced. At its core, the most profound human longing might be to create something as flawless as nature itself.

This seems like an insurmountable challenge, given that we have only begun to explore the vast complexities of the universe and grasp the intricacies of life. But it’s a profound motivator: to design communities as self-sustaining as bee colonies, to build a product as regenerative as coral reefs, and to create an experience as awe-inspiring as a sunset. Nature is the benchmark for excellence, mainly because it is committed to its process, which is always evolving. 

Technology has empowered us with tools that make standing out in certain domains much more accessible and attainable. For the first time in human history, there seem to be some shortcuts to producing work that stands out without much practice, training, or iteration. No-code tools enable founders to rapidly build, test, and scale products. Midjourney and similar tools have made it easy for the average person to dream up a stellar visual in seconds. Virtual reality tools let designers and architects create immersive spaces without years of technical training. The age of infinite possibilities is here and will continue to enable more people to build and create. But I’d argue that mainstream access and production aren’t necessarily resulting in exceptional work, and worse, they’re not helping us become better at what we do by learning through the process of trying, failing, and trying again. 

The standards for excellence will continue to shift in the coming decades, especially as we question who or what produced the work. But something really interesting will happen in this process: as more people produce art, products, and experiences in collaboration with technology, people themselves and the experiences they create will stand out. Anything in-person and live will cut through the digital noise like a comet flying through your living room. Not just because it’s better but because we won’t have to question its authenticity or integrity. In a world where shortcuts become the norm, exceptional leaders, performers, speakers, facilitators, and athletes will captivate us even more. Their effort, talent, and discipline will be obvious and deeply appreciated. We may even want or need to see people in their process as they create, design, build, and develop—this may become a genre or category unto itself. 

Visionaries and leaders who can command attention through sheer will, focus, commitment, and relentless determination will define the new standards for excellence. We’ll refer to them as ‘purists’ as an entire counter-culture emerges to challenge the rising tides of convenience and mass production. It will be harder to stand out, keep up, or reach product/market fit in a society where everyone is optimizing for scale and algorithmic success. Those who do will be outliers or communities that have come together to redefine and decentralize achievement. Either way, they will become the benchmarks for a future where excellence is measured by impact, not output. One can only hope that more people will continue to look to and learn from nature’s way of being, doing, and growing as a model for how we might innovate. 

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