EXCELLENCE OVER EVERYTHING

your resume isn’t your resume. your worldview is.

Team Ferrari, 1967, Daytona.

The logistics of talent search can be complex, but the core of it is simple.

The whole game is about excellence. Identifying it, attracting it, delivering it. And hopefully, embodying it yourself. The rest is details.

Here are three beliefs about excellence. They inform how we find the best talent for our clients, and more importantly, they outline how anyone can move themselves into an elite position.

1. EXCELLENCE IS PARAMOUNT

This statement is not profound, except that it is, because modernity has pulled our attention toward… attention. But attention is not excellence.

My definition of excellence: Extreme levels of care, thoughtfulness, accountability, learning, improvement, and the ability to get lost in the work; focused purely on exercising craft even in the absence of praise or reward.

The most excellent individual is usually the individual who cares the most.

Experience, skill, work ethic, intelligence, proficiency, resilience, relationships, and reputation are all downstream from caring about excellence.

2. EXCELLENCE IS RARE

The opposite of excellence is mediocrity, and mediocrity is far more prevalent than excellence. That means if an organization recruits from a sample section of the public, there are high odds that said organization is hiring mediocre.

(This is not meant as an insult. Mediocrity is not stupidity; it is merely the default. Many play at that level because that’s all that has been expected of them, or because they haven’t been exposed to a higher standard. Once exposed, a few will choose to begin the work of elevating their own standards. These are the people we champion.)

Mediocrity hides inside interview tactics, smooth talk, and, it quite literally *hides* inside bloated organizations, where blame can be passed around effortlessly.

Eliminating mediocrity is leadership’s #1 job, and obscuring mediocrity is mediocrity’s #1 job.

3. EXCELLENCE IS AN ATTITUDE

It’s not a list of skills or experiences. It’s a set of standards and beliefs. Standards and beliefs are choices.

I don’t care how many AI tools you’ve mastered, how many hours you work, how many digital marketing hacks you’re deploying, or how many years you’ve been in a certain industry.

If you do not have the agency to control the quality of your thoughts, you will not bring optimism to your work, and if you don’t bring optimism to your work, your work will suffer.

When seeking excellence, the first thing we screen out is victim mentality.

To succeed in an elite role, you must be able to, at the very least, succeed in convincing yourself that good things can happen, and that you can make them happen.

Master your circumstances, because your resume is not your resume. Your worldview is.

*For inspiration on the topics of work, craft, and engaging with excellence for its own sake, I recommend reading Will Manitis’ beautiful essay Rented Virtue.

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