Excellence Is a Process. Perfectionism Is an Evaluation.

One of my early mentors once told me that he had been named after Marcus Aurelius.

I wondered first if this gave a clue to the man behind the name, but ended up thinking more about what it meant to be reared by parents who chose that name. His parents were both professors. What had they had hoped for when they gave their son the name of the Stoic emperor. What qualities did they imagine the name might call forward? Wisdom? Discipline? Courage? Character?

In Maxwell Staniforth’s 1964 translation of Meditations, Aurelius writes, “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” It is a remarkably economical sentence.

It says: Stop constructing the ideal. Enter reality.

Aurelius is writing about virtue, but I think the observation is apt for performance of all types. There comes a point at which our conception of the thing can begin to interfere with the thing itself. We can spend so much time considering what a good teacher should be that we become less attentive to the student in front of us. We can become so occupied with what an excellent performance should sound like that we stop listening to the music we are actually making.

The ideal remains pristine precisely because it has never had to encounter reality.

Action does, and action is fragile.

A note cracks. A sentence lands badly. A presentation wanders. A race is lost. An experiment fails. Someone misunderstands us. The thing we create turns out differently from the thing we imagined. In these examples there is a moment to evaluate and an evaluator. That is the nature of perfectionism.

The Difference Between Excellence and Perfectionism

I have come to think of excellence and perfectionism as fundamentally different orientations.

Excellence is a process. Perfectionism is an evaluation.

This is not meant as a complete psychological definition of perfectionism, since there are many forms of it. Instead, it describes something I have repeatedly seen in performers, creators, students, and high achievers.

Excellence asks us to turn toward the work.

Perfectionism eventually turns us around to look at ourselves.

How am I doing? How did that look? Was that good enough? What will they think? Did I make a mistake? Does this prove I belong here?

The work that began as music, scholarship, athletics, leadership, teaching, or creation slowly becomes evidence in a trial about the person doing it.

This is one reason perfectionism can masquerade so convincingly as excellence. Both may involve extraordinary standards and may involve discipline, care, preparation, and ambition, but their attention is pointed in different directions. Excellence asks, What does this work require of me? Perfectionism asks, What will this work reveal about me?

Love Is Better Than a Song

From a very different philosopher there is a line that gives us another touch point for this idea. In Cat Stevens’s Don’t Be Shy, he sings that “love is better than a song.”

I have always loved the audacity of that idea coming from a songwriter.

A song can describe love beautifully and even give rise to the sweeping memories or future yearning. It idealizes human experience and shapes it into three minutes. Actual love has no such protection.

Actual love is inconvenient and vulnerable. It risks rejection. It requires another human being who will not follow the script. It can be clumsy. It asks something of us. And still, love is better than a song, because the song is about love while loving is the thing itself.

Marcus Aurelius makes essentially the same demand in another register.

Do not merely construct goodness. Be good. Do not become so fascinated by the idea that you neglect the act. This distinction matters enormously for anyone who creates or performs, because the imagined version of our contribution will almost always be more idealized than the contribution itself.

The performance that exists only in imagination receives no criticism.

It also gives us something the ideal never can:

the possibility of contribution.

The Imperfect Gift

A creator eventually has to give something, that is both the valuable and the dangerous part.

Once the work leaves us, we lose control of it. Other people may misunderstand it, criticize it, ignore it, alter it, or simply fail to see what we hoped they would see.

Perfectionism offers a seductive solution: keep improving the gift until you can control the reception, but of course, we cannot.

No degree of preparation can guarantee applause, editing cannot force understanding and even a flawless audition can’t make a panel choose us.

At some point excellence requires the courage to stop managing the verdict and return to the contribution.

What am I here to give?

That question is very different from How am I being evaluated?

Performance is a gift, and because this gift enters reality through human beings, it arrives bearing the marks of humanity. It can not be flawless in many senses.

But it can be excellent.

Excellence Belongs to Reality

Perhaps this is why excellence cannot finally be understood as flawlessness. Flawlessness is an abstraction while excellence occurs in reality and is “practiced,” “rehearsed,” and “revised”. Sometimes it is lost and sometimes it is recovered. It develops through encounters with things we could not completely predict.

Aristotle understood virtue through habituation. The Stoics returned again and again to action. Artists learn through drafts. Musicians learn through performances. Scientists learn through experiments that may not produce the expected result.

Reality participates in the education.

Be One

There is an irony in writing an essay about Marcus Aurelius telling us to stop talking and act. Eventually even this idea has to leave the page.

The performer must walk onstage.

The student must submit the paper.

The entrepreneur must open the doors.

The artist must show the work.

The person must say what needs to be said.

The imagined gift may always remain more perfect.

Give the real one anyway.

Excellence finally asks this of us: not that we become indifferent to quality, but that we care about quality enough to submit our work to reality.

We must practice, revise, and risk being seen to contribute something that could not have existed without us.

Marcus Aurelius reduced the matter to three words:

Be. or act. 

And perhaps for the creator, performer, scholar, athlete, teacher, or anyone else attempting something that matters, the invitation is much the same:

Do the work. Give the gift. Let excellence be something you practice rather than something others must certify.