Be excellent.

I want to be truly great.

So the question is, how do we become excellent?

You don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process. ~ xkcd 896

Interconnectedness takes me from that illustration, to a place that makes me want to watch a Tony Robbins video.

Tony says being great depends on tiny differences that put a person in a state of certainty, confidence, and flow.

To be excellent, we train ourselves emotionally. Get rituals.

Incantations, not affirmations, embody what we want.

Incantations help us navigate MUSTs vs SHOULDs.

As we move from within our own minds out to interactions with others, influence is essential.

Because when two people are having a conversation, the one who is more certain is going to influence the one who is less certain. Always.

This is why I've been thinking a lot about conversations lately.

And conversations are the foundation of 106 Miles.

106 Miles recently had a conversation of greatness, which inspired me to find 11 great quotes...

11) "Greatness doesn't take two months, or even a year. It takes years of focused practice to achieve even an ounce of it." ~ Trizle

10) "Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person." ~ Albert Einstein

9) "On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure." ~ Malcolm Gladwell

8) "Success is moving from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." ~ Winston Churchill

7) "Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." ~ Will Durant, not Aristotle

6) "Excellence is not a skill; it is an attitude." ~ Ralph Marston

5) "You do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don't exist. (Sorry, Warren Buffett.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that's demanding and painful." ~ Geoffrey Colvin

4) "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

3) "Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success." ~ Swami Sivananda

2) "It's not what you take but what you leave behind that defines greatness." ~ Edward Gardner

1) "It's not where you take things from; it's where you take them to." ~ Jim Jarmusch

Now, I am incanting to take excellence to me.