Making excellence a habit

On the official enke: make your mark faceboook page (here) Bheki Nyembe enke graduate from the 2010 forum decided to share with us the inspirational quote above.Thus begun my quest to figure out what exactly this excellence is and how we too can be excellent.

My online search tells me that being excellence is defined as being first-rate, beyond average and outstanding. Especially amongst the very high achieving enke alumni it is something many of us are aiming for and challenging ourselves to be, whether in our academics, with our CAPS, or in sports and our own various hobbies. While reading up on the subject I found a list with some loose guidelines on how to do just that…be excellent.

According to the Harvard Business Review;

“1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.

2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Great performers have found that and delay gratification, taking on the difficult work of practice before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.

3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity.

4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.

5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.

6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, strict times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.”

Let us know what works for you, what doesn’t…what you agree with and what you don’t. And hopefully we can all be first-rate, beyond average and outstanding on our way to ‘making our mark’ in our respective fields!