Competitive excellence are two words that I have never put together in the same phrase until today. A long-time trusted friend, business partner, team leader, and mentor of mine sent me a quote today titled Competitive Excellence. It was in reference to an article about how the Ritz-Carlton, for the first time many years ago, won a very prestigious award, basically an award that gave them the highest rank of any client-related service industry in their field. When asked what this award meant to them for all their years of hard work and accomplishment, the owner of Ritz-Carlton said it simply meant this: “We’ve got to be better tomorrow.”
Competitive excellence is something a lot of people don’t understand. Many people in sports, life, and in certain achievements, reach a certain level. They reach the pinnacle, they reach the top of their game, and they decide to let up. They think that they’ve done everything there is to do. They’ve reached the final mark. They’ve reached the highest level. And from there, that’s it. But competitive excellence is reaching that milestone, reaching that accomplishment, and waking up the next day knowing that there’s more to do.
See, if you’re not waking up every day with a mindset of competitive excellence, if you’re not waking up every day trying to be a little bit better than you were the day before, you’re going to end up being inadequate. And from day after day of being adequate, then you’ll accept mediocrity. And from mediocrity, it becomes less than normal, subpar, and downright not very good.
Competitive excellence is very hard for some people to realize because they wonder when you’ll ever stop. They wonder when enough’s good enough. They wonder if they can ever do anything to achieve the ultimate goal. But that’s not it. It’s not that you can never be pleased. The ultimate goal is that you’ve got to strive to be better. True competitors that are in it for life are always trying to be better. They always try to do more. They always try to be more. And they never, ever stop. That is the true essence of competitive excellence, and it gives me a renewed spirit and mindset to wake up tomorrow and be better than I was today.
Competitive Excellence
