Similarly, achieving excellence in a given field, consistently, day by day, depends on a set of important underlying conditions.
These conditions may include the following: adopting a positive attitude; working very hard; overcoming obstacles and setbacks; and leveraging one's abilities with those of others.
In this post, however, my focus is on a condition that may surprise those of us who have been high achievers for most of our lives: the courage to be bad.
Let me repeat that again. The courage to be bad. On first sight, this conditions seems inconsistent with achieving excellence. Being bad and achieving excellence are polar opposites, are they not?
Yes and no, is the answer to that question. The paradox can be solved by thinking in the following way:
If I am trying to be good at everything, I will be excellent at nothing.
In other words, if I am truly to be excellent at one thing, I must gather the courage to be very bad at another thing, or as is more likely, MANY other things.
A second condition that complements the courage to be bad is that of collaboration. This condition is similar to the first, in that it recognises one's own innate limitations and seeks to overcome them through active cooperation and teamwork with others
Collaboration is the act of, first, recognising your own weaknesses, and second, valuing the strengths of others, which, when combined with those of your own, produces a superior outcome than that which results from the sum of the independent parts.
A human trait that enables collaboration to thrive more effectively is humility, which I define below:
Humility is not holding oneself in low esteem, but holding others in high esteem.
In exercising humility, and thereby holding others in high esteem, we provide others with 'breathing space' or 'psychological air', a space that would typically be filled with hostility and hatred in the absence of humility.
In summarising this post, it is worth considering that the courage to be bad complements the act of being humble, which, as aforementioned, supports collaboration.
The courage to be bad shows that you appreciate the expertise of people in fields other than your own, and therefore, holds those people in high esteem.
In essence, then, the courage to be bad can be viewed as the starting condition for achieving excellence. Perhaps the price we must pay for being successful and achieving excellence is to suck at other things. I would describe that as a fair bargain.
