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excellence

achieving failure

Olympics

drug use

performance enhancing drugs

is achieved by dozens of small skills perfected and fitted together. It is nothing extraordinary or superhuman.

chambliss, calling this 'the mundanity of excellence', writes, 'superb performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions: only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produced excellence' (Chambliss 1989:81).

is distinguishing oneself from everyone else in a way that is tied always to the public realm, the presence of others.

quote 'Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy... for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required, and this presence needs the formality of the public, constituted by one's peers, it cannot be the casual, familiar presence of one's equals or inferiors' (Arendt HC:49)a 'outstanding speech and action that distinguishes oneself'1. 'to the extent that the actor gives political content to his excellence of words and deeds he is remembered by history, that great 'storybook of mankind' and wins for himself immortal fame.

is not an act, but a habit, because one is what one repeatedly does.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. (Aristotle)

 lies not in winning every battle, but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting.

Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle, but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting. Sun Tzu

There is no excellence uncoupled with difficulties. Ovid

is the making of great demands of oneself.

We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself. Jose Ortega y Gasset

is when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do. Jose Ortega y Gasset

is not just underappreciated. The sad truth is that it makes people nervous.

excellence, n.All

excellence