Excellence is a Pursuit, Not a Destination
The Shift to Devotional Presence
I’m feeling spicy this week.
Excellence isn’t something you achieve. It’s something you pursue.
I use excellence because it makes for a good hook. For the purpose of this essay, insert whatever it is you most deeply care about in this chapter of life:
Wealth creation is a pursuit, not a destination
Peak performance is a pursuit, not a destination
Great parenting is a pursuit, not a destination
Discovering your true self is a pursuit, not a destination
The tl;dr: None of these things are a place that you arrive to, but rather being and doing in alignment with an ideal1. You’ll likely never achieve that ideal—not even for a moment. That’s not the point. The point is being and doing in alignment with it.
The Arrival Fallacy
The belief that excellence is something that can be achieved is called the Arrival Fallacy. It’s the incorrect belief that, one day, you’ll permanently arrive at a state of being called “excellence”. This is accompanied by a belief that once you arrive to that permanent state of excellence (peak performance/great parenthood/insert your thing here), you can finally relax, let go, and be present. You will be complete.
Here’s the thing: life doesn’t work that way. You won’t arrive. You won’t get to a place where you will finally be what you want to be and live in a state of permanent contentment, knowing that you have secured that as your place forever.
Super bowl winners just want to win the super bowl next year. Great parents have to go on parenting and consistently realign to what great parenting means. Excellence, greatness, presence, they’re all practices, ongoing pursuits, not places to arrive to.
The people you think have arrived, the people you would kill to be, haven’t arrived. They are in pursuit, showing up and doing the work day in and day out. Even pro athletes find another mountain to summit after they retire. They are in pursuit.
If you were to ask an athlete at the top of their game if they’ve achieved peak performance, they’d scoff. It’s a nonsensical question. The point of excellence as an idea isn’t that you arrive there. It’s not something to achieve. It’s something to strive for. It’s something to live in devotion to. We can never know when we’re at the peak. And that’s not the point. It’s about the pursuit of it, not the mythical (and I mean that literally) arrival to it.
To lose sight of this is a big mistake. The moment you assume excellence is somewhere you can arrive to, it means you’re not there. And you’ll likely make that mean that something is wrong with you. You assume absence. And that absence only serves to hold you back.
There’s nowhere to arrive to other than here. You can’t. You will never arrive to excellence, or peak performance, or great parenting, great leadership, or “true self”. That’s not a place. The only place is here. So let go of all that. Let go of blaming yourself for not being there. Let go of being in a hurry to get there. Because you won’t. And all that serves to do is to take you away from the only place you can arrive to, which is into yourself, right here and right now.
Shifting from Arrival to Devotion
I’ve been going through a transformational program this year, and we’ve been exploring the question what are you devoted to?
This whole inquiry began with that simple term: devotion.
What does it mean to be devoted to something?
I make up it means to be wholly dedicated to it. Wholly focused on it. Wholly invested in it. And all of that, regardless of whatever pay off you get in the moment. Because you’ve decided this is who it is worth being, what is worth doing, and a world worth living in devotion to.
When you see that you’ll never arrive anywhere, you can give up on that and simply be here. And once you’re here, there’s only one question to ask: What am I devoted to in this moment?
This question frees you from the chains of arrival. It’s not about getting anywhere. It’s not about being somewhere other than here. It’s about what you want to be devoted to and how you can live in devotion to that thing, right now.
You may be in a rush to get to the answer, to know what you want to be devoted to. Don’t be. And don’t try to think your way to it. Wait for it to come to you. Listen to your body, to echoes from deep inside of you and your unconscious. Let your devotion come from presence and love, not from your head or thoughts about what you should be devoted to.
This is, after all, what makes great people great. They identify what their whole being wants to be devoted to, what their very life force craves, and they live in devotion to it.
Escaping the Hamster Wheel
Some of you might be thinking: oh god, you’re telling me I’m going to be on the hamster wheel of pursuit forever?
No. I’m telling you that it’s time to smash the hamster wheel and be done with it.
Being on the hamster wheel is to manically pursue an outcome, believing it’s a place that you can arrive to. Inevitably you don’t (or you momentarily believe that you have and lament when you lose it).
I want to make it crystal clear: you will never arrive to your destination.
So give up on it.
That doesn’t mean you’ll never be excellent or a great leader or parent.
What it means is you will never reach some magical place of completion where you will have irrevocably achieved that.
You will not find Atlantis.
When you accept that fact, and I mean REALLY accept that fact, you’re able to arrive at the only place there is to arrive: here. The present. Reality. The never-ending unfolding process that is now. The expansive, beautiful, delicious pursuit.
So stop trying to arrive. Stop trying to get anywhere. Instead, be here, in the deliciousness of devotional presence.
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I realize “being and doing in alignment with an ideal” is a bit abstract. What I mean, in its simplest, is relentlessly asking yourself, “What would I do if I were optimizing for X?” where X is the thing you most care about. Being and doing in alignment with an ideal is simply the act of asking yourself that question, over and over again.
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