Arete, Excellence, and Clowns Gone Bad

“Aim small, miss small.” – The Patriot

“Owning a nuclear weapon means never having to say you’re sorry.” – John Wilders Book of Quotes:  Cannibal Soup for the Soul™  For reals, I’m thinking about publishing a book of collected essays from this blog, and that’s the title I want to use, and thus the ™.  It’s MINE!

One of my professors at college had very, very precise printed block letters.  One day we were talking and he brought it up, especially since my own writing was, shall we say, a challenge to read.  I think I was his Teaching Assistant at that point in graduate school

My professor:  “One day, I was in my forties, I just decided that every single letter that I wrote was going to be perfect.  Absolutely perfect.  So, from that moment, no matter how slowly I had to write, I was going to be the best.  I took a month and just focused on printing my letters perfectly every day.  After a month, it was habit.”

Being 20, I missed the significance of this, and only on reflecting now do I realize what my professor was really saying:

“Wilder, you may have written something great.  You may have written something awful.  I just can’t read it.”

How bad was my hand writing?  When I was in sixth grade, my teacher required every essay or book report to be in cursive so we could practice our handwriting at the same time we produced a book report.  My teacher pulled me aside.  “John, please print your essays.”  She had come to the (correct) conclusion that my handwriting was less decipherable than cuneiform texts, and that her only hope of ever grading one of them was for me to print it or for her to go back to graduate school and learn the ancient secrets of my people:  Those Who Have Crappy Handwriting.

She let me just print my essays and book reports.

It was a big deal to me and I felt free after that.  I hated cursive.  I even remember the book that I was doing the report on:  Farmer in the Sky, by Robert A. Heinlein.  My teacher had no idea what the book was about, and actually had me read the report to her twice so that she was certain that I wasn’t making it all up on the spot.  The skill of reading my own handwriting helped me:  if I could read my own handwriting, I could read anything.

Printing?  That totally worked for me.  I actually do it to this day, but I prefer typing.  It’s quicker, but printing simple block letters works.

This is, supposedly, a receipt from a slave sale back in ancient Babylon.  Imagine having to write a receipt out in clay, make a copy, and then put it in an oven.  The drive through at their McDonalds® must have been slooooooow.

In thinking back to my professor’s writing self-improvement plan, I realize it wasn’t random, it was a process.  The first step was, by far, the most important:

Wilder Rule Of Excellence Number One:  Raise Your Standards

If you’re trying to write a perfect upper case E, a sloppy E or a tilty E just won’t do.  And maybe your first E won’t be perfect, but I assure you it will be better than the E you wrote when you weren’t concentrating on it.  It isn’t easy.  It’s slow.  It’s frustrating.  But once you’ve changed your standards internally, a crappy E is something you won’t tolerate.  You’ll notice it and it will drive you nuts.  Every E becomes a challenge in perfection.

When you change your standards, your standards change you.  I’m sure someone else has said that before, since there have been roughly 105 billion people that have lived since 50,000 B.C., so if I’m one human in a million, there are 105,000 others just like me who have lived.  Thankfully, we don’t all live in the same city

But the whole “When you change your standards, your standards change you” line?  I came up with it myself.  I wrote it as my own original thought and realize it might be my most profound thought today, even if Descartes™ or Aristotle® or Judge Judy© said it first.  Thankfully, I’m in luck, I had another original thought today:  balsa wood would not make a good salad topping, either in chunks or shredded.  Feel free to discuss.

Wilder Rule Of Excellence Number Two:  There Are No Shortcuts

Okay, I know that’s not original.  I recall a joke about a person who wanted enlightenment and inner peace.  And they wanted it right now!

Some Random Dude told the Dalai Lama the following joke:  “How does a Buddhist like his pizza?”

The Dalai Lama: “I don’t know.”

Random Dude:  “One with everything.”

The Dalai Lama:  “I don’t get it.”

The above is supposedly true.  In my imagination the Dalai Lama responded with:  “Okay, I know a better one.  Two lesbian surveyors and a horse walk into a bar . . . .”

Getting better at anything is hard work.  It turns out that those who are the very best at, for instance, playing violin, practice more than people who aren’t as good.  Practice is absolutely necessary to creating excellence.  But the practice that works best is the practice that happens when you are right at the edge of your abilities.  It’s when you’re practicing at that edge that this weird blend of focus and trance takes over.  I’m sure that there’s a word for it, but in my mind it’s this state where the sense of self disappears.  Perhaps the best word would be transcendent – when I’m there I lose track of time.  I don’t think about the practice of writing a perfect E.  I am the practice of writing a perfect E.  I am excellence.  With an E.

The management guru Tom Peters! (he likes to put exclamation! points! behind! everything!) wrote a column that I read in 1999.  Tom Peters! was travelling, and decided that Tom Peters! was going to start running.  His column stuck with me.  Tom Peters! noted, more or less, that he was a very slow runner, but there was absolutely nothing preventing him from practicing like a world-class runner.  He could push himself to his limits.  Tom Peters! didn’t have to wait to train like a world-class runner.  Tom Peters! could do it right this minute.

Like my professor, last month I decided I’d improve my writing.  Sure, I can read it and the NSA® can’t, but I decided I’d give it a shot.  I focused every day when putting my daily to-do list together to make each letter perfect, each E a combination of right angles, as straight as I could make it.  Amazingly I got better.  I also noticed this – even when writing a simple to-do list, I could be transcendent.  I could lose myself in a quest to be excellent.

I think, in part, our world today seeks to trivialize the search for excellence.  The Greeks nailed this in what they called Arete.  Catherynne M. Valente described it like this:

The word I love is Arete.   It has a simple meaning, and a complicated meaning.  The simple one is:  excellence.  But if that were all, we’d just use Excellence and I wouldn’t bring it up until we got to E.  Arete means your own excellence.  Your very own.  A personal excellence that belongs to no one else, one that comes out of all the things that make you special and different . . . . It could be anything in the world . . . .  It’s even harder to get that good at it, because nothing, not even being yourself, comes without practice.

Arete also has the additional meaning of living up to your potential, fulfilling your purpose.  I think many things about the way society is organized today serve to sever us from Arete.  Television and movies make you a character in someone else’s Arete.  You replace the feeling of excellence from actual achievement with psychologically experiencing someone else’s Arete.  Some video games are like that as well, though certainly many require a great degree of skill.

And, yes, the highest and best use of some people is to play video games.

But much of modern work today is built around processes and defined procedures.  The idea isn’t that you do work with Arete, the idea is that you do mediocre work consistently.  And you can do that work with people who have an I.Q. of 85 or 90.

Replacing Arete with processes and procedures lowers liability and provides consistency.  It’s why people go to McDonaldsâ„¢ – not many people think of it as their favorite food, but it’s inexpensive, consistent in quality, and fast.

Honestly, Arete is why I write this blog.  When a good theme hits and I’m writing, I cease being.  I am the blog.  I am living a transcendent moment.  I am Arete.   Modern life takes us from that with process-driven jobs.

I described this post to The Boy while we enjoyed the hot tub tonight.  The best conversations happen in the hot tub.  No phones, no television, just discussion.  The Boy immediately brought up Fight Club.  Fight Club might be my favorite movie, primarily because of the amazing amounts of Truth© that pop up in it.  The Boy reminded me of an early scene in the movie, where the protagonist had a job that sucked his soul, but he could make his own Arete by making the perfect home by buying the perfect furniture from Fight Club Ikea.  The thing missing from our soul today is simple:  we want to be excellent, but the structure of modern society is pulling us away from Arete.

Are we willing to trade in our Arete for the perfect furniture?  Are we willing to trade in our Arete for a video game?

Can’t you just smell the Arete coming from the cube farm?  No, that’s the smell of coffee.  And despair.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not.  And if you looked at my to-do list?  It’s much better this month than last month.  Excellence is something we can do every day.  We can become transcendent in our tasks, no matter how lowly – if your task in this minute is to clean the floormats of a funky French fraternity’s ferret using your fingers, lose yourself in it.  Do the best job you can possibly do.

This Wilder, Wealthy and Wise post is brought to you by the word Arete, the letter E, and the number e.  (The number e thing is a math joke.)