The Sunday News
Itai Chipunza
1 Kings 10 verse 27
THE King made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones, and made cedar trees as abundant as the sycamores which are in the lowland.
There are places and people in this world that have successfully managed to make excellence a normal thing. Excellence has become their everyday standard of doing things. Then there are some that claim to have made excellence their standard but you can see the rough edges of mediocrity in what they do. Today the egg they make is good, tomorrow it is not. No excellence in that. Tomorrow you walk into the shop they smile, tomorrow they don’t.
Another rough edge of mediocrity starts showing. Excellence is getting the best out of an experience, everyday. Not only on some days, but each and every time. Any keen Bible reader will attest to the fact that King Solomon was one such man. One very clear thing that marks him out as a man of excellence is how he managed to make being wealthy seem very normal. In Jerusalem having silver was not a thing of note. Gold was the new excellent, silver was normal. This is at a time where other kings would rejoice at gifts of silver, Solomon would accept them but they meant nothing to his wealth because he was truly a man of excellence.
It is not by any means easy to make excellence your everyday thing. It requires years of relentless training and correction and redoing things until it becomes nature to you to only seek out the best. It does not happen overnight. We see it in hotels, schools, companies and individuals. Excellence takes a lot of doing. One has to purposely avoid the mediocre and aim for the greater. I know a hotel where the toilets are freshened up every two hours, regardless of whether it has been used by anyone within those two hours or not. This is a good thing but it is not excellent, because the excellent have employed one who is entirely dedicated to the toilet and is in it constantly making sure it is always clean. In flights you see it with the service the air hostesses give you. In standard flights, they speak good English and are dressed well. This is a good standard, but in the excellent flights, they don’t only speak good Engligh, they speak many international languages fluently. They walk the same and speak the same, only their faces can tell them apart.
Desirable as it may sound to be such a person or organisation, excellence will cost you money. I assure you. Excellence at anything will most definitely cost you money and in most cases, a lot of it. Let’s take for example the hours of training that go into teaching people over 10 different international languages. To make it more complex, it is people of different ethnic backgrounds, different races and of different ascents. At the end of the training these people should be able to walk the same, talk the same, have an immaculate sense of dressing and at the very least maintain that or become better each year. That will cost you money, money to establish training facilities. Training the trainers, paying the trainers, getting training equipment, cost of examination, and accommodation for the students, just to name a few. It costs colossal sums of money to mould an excellent air hostess out of an average person who has spoken at most two languages their entire life. After all, this is the reason we pay more for the excellent flights than we do in the average ones. The experience is different.
It will cost you time to be excellent. Unless you have become omnipresent, time is the most precious commodity that you cannot afford to waste. A basic hotel and catering course will cost you a year of your time. After one year, you have a person with a rudimentary understanding of how a hotel should function. At this point this person has no experience at all. All they know is what their lecturer told them. Now imagine the time it would then take to train that same person to an excellent hotel manager. The person would have to understand accounting, human resources, beverage management, food management, housekeeping and a whole lot more. Basically they need to know how each and everything in the hotel functions. At the same time this individual will also need to be able to replicate himself in people working under him/her. So there is a need for them to go through intensive leadership training. After achieving this excellent hotel manager, you now have to make sure you keep him/her at the hotel to get a return on the investment that you made in him while he was under training. All this effort costs time. Yet it is not guaranteed to bring an excellent manager because the person may choose to sit on all this knowledge. So it could be time wasted if they do not then channel the best effort into the task to which they have been trained. The excellence that Solomon had indeed will cost a lot of time. One must be willing to undergo the necessary schooling to achieve this. Schooling does not only mean formal schools. One could have to spend time with a mentor, attending workshops and seminars and in some cases observe one that you seek to be like.
Excellence will cost you friends and companions. A lot of people find it very difficult to be in a place where excellence is a basic requirement. Very often individuals who push for an excellent level of life face a lot of resistance even from people that you are not necessarily competing with. This is so because they feel that with an excellent person around, they are not visible. Some feel as though you are out to make them look bad, yet in actual truth, excellence is not a competition with anyone. On the contrary it is competition with yourself to try and improve what you have always thought to be your best self. If before, getting 80 percent in an exam was your best, when you try and push for 90 percent other students will begin to ridicule the effort you are putting into studying, revising, asking the teachers questions and maintaining a strict schedule to absorb as much as you can. This is because 90 percent begins to require you to be at a more focused posture than 80 percent did. They do not realise that you are not trying to make their marks look bad, you are only chasing an excellent self. Co-existing with the excellent is a huge challenge. Imagine how things around King Solomon felt when they encountered him. It must have been so belittling to observe how his kingdom functioned. Push to be excellent, it is worth your time on earth. Be blessed.
