Escape From Excellence

I recently picked up a copy of This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin at the Harvard Bookstore. I was disappointed. Levitin points out that in study after study of musicians, athletes, and other peak performers, it takes 10,00 hours to reach virtuosity, what he also calls mastery. That’s three hours per day for a decade. Or eight hours per day for a shorter time. Apparently if you do that, you will develop virtuoso level skills, you will master your craft. So this means that everyone who has worked full time for four years is a master? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, this 10,00 hour investment is only good enough to achieve excellence. But excellence is not virtuosity. Mastery is virtuosity, and mastery is about a lot more than skill. Virtuosity without mastery is callow, adolescent, and ugly. It leads to tasteless, ghettoized excess. Just ask Yngwie Malmsteen.

I attended the New England Conservatory for a few years. The freshman class was made up of blindingly good kids who wowed everyone back home. The senior class was even better. The problem was that most of the young ones, including me, sounded like skilled typists or impersonators. Few became real artists, and those that did are really something. Don Byron was a classmate. John Medeski came a bit later. There were others. But most wallowed in focusing on skill development or in emulating masters. These young people were certainly excellent, and to be admired for their effort, commitment, etc. But mastery? Not usually. Mastery is qualititatively different than excellence. It is different in kind, not in degree. Excellence takes 10,000 hours (at least), but mastery can occur in a moment. Any time spent chasing excellence after the Falling Point keeps us away from reaching mastery. It only increases costs and undermines performance. Mastery requires outting al that skill in the service of your Dynamic Essence.

Don’t confuse excellence with virtuosity. Virtuosity takes mastery, and that’s a whole ‘nother world.

When the Limits of Excellence are reached, the Virtues of Excellence are transformed into these corruptions. Please remember, they aren’t crimes or “sins;” they aren’t corruptions in that sense. We call them corruptions because, by definition, they take something good (the Five Virtues of Excellence) and dilute it and transform it into something unhealthy and harmful. So when we cross the Falling Point and the corruptions set in, we are guilty of nothing more than pushing ourselves to be excellent. And that’s something to be proud of. The problem is that this is precisely how excellence traps us and holds us back. Here they are:
Entropy
Entropy occurs when the physical and mental limits of Effort are surpassed. It signals a breakdown of the system. This system can refer to a person, a team, or an entire enterprise. So an excellent person, giving his or her all, eventually hit a wall when there’s no more effort to give. Hello Entropy.

Technocracy
Proficiency is merely a cost-of-entry, and it’s the same for everyone. So, when we rely upon proficiency beyond its limit, asking it to somehow differentiate us or drive truly great achievement, we’ve asked it to do what it can’t do. Excellent proficiency may look amazing to a novice, but masters know it’s never the end all. When we make it our focus, it can lead to a cult of capability, or Technocracy. We see this in the athlete who has no grace, the musician who has no taste, the prose stylist who has no ideas. They are like circus performers, and are soon forgotten.

Fixation
Fixation happens when the limits of healthy Commitment are surpassed. Eventually, our priorities, strategies, and organizations become misaligned. We’ve all seen fixated people who like to think they are committed. They mean well, but they have lost the plot. Perhaps they should be committed?

Rigidity
When Expertise is asked to have a vision, which it lacks by definition, Rigidity sets in. Then what we think we know supplants what we actually see, and progress becomes marginal and incremental. We’ve all known people who are great at project or operations management, but lack “the vision thing.” When something doesn’t go the way they’d like, unless they have other resources, skills, and frameworks to draw upon, they often dig in their heels, becoming rigid. They confuse this with expertise, with an assist from commitment. Wrong. It’s ego, plain and simple. The virtue of excellence got corrupted into rigidity, and the cost to themselves, their team, and the enterprise is following right behind.

Cunning
Cunning occurs when the limits of Acumen are reached and strategy is reduced to self-serving tactics. Acumen has an attitude of openness and considers navigation to part of the strategic adventure of business and life. Cunning sets in when that attitude is lost, when facts, information, and the map grow fuzzy. Because nobody has perfect information at all times, cunning is always a temptation.

Let’s talk about the crucial idea of the Falling Point. This is where the rubber meets the road, or really more like where the poop hits the fan. This explains just how and when the Excellence Trap gets us.

When we surpass the built-in limit of any of the Virtues of Excellence, which inevitably occurs, we reach the Falling Point. When this happens, our lifelong upward arc gradually takes a new direction, and at first we don’t even notice. This is the great irony of being excellent; eventually it bites us, and we don’t know why. But, like a subatomic particle or distant star, we can’t see it directly; we can only “see” it by its effects.

These effects include all the costs and challenges that we observe confronting those hardworking, well- intentioned, capable, successful, and excellent people we mentioned earlier: struggling to achieve the extra 5%, sustain peak performance and innovation, while confronting merely incremental change, marginal outcomes, limited advantage, and inconsistent inspiration, focus, and alignment with values and goals.

The Falling Point is sort of like the point of diminishing returns, except that it is really more like the point of incurring and accruing hidden and unnecessary costs. Big difference.

The moment we reach the Falling Point, on any one of the Virtues, the Corruptions of Excellence set in and the Costs of Excellence come racing behind. This explains why good people aren’t enjoying a life of mastery. And this is precisely what forces the choice between 1. falling back into mediocrity or 2. ascending to mastery, if you’re even fortunate enough to make the choice; most driven people just stick it out in excellence, not knowing what hit them, until the costs become too high. In the meantime, they ride the roller coaster, play the odds, and try to beat the clock, all the while wasting time with the Five Failed Strategies of Excellence.

But take heart, every master was there once. Then they escaped from excellence.

 Remeber this: We don’t cross the Falling Point because we have failed in any way. Quite the opposite. We only cross it if we are excellent! And that is how excellence traps us, every time.