Today, we’re launching a new podcast as part of the project here at The Worthy Excellence Institute: Excellence Becoming - A Gold Standards Original. With this comes a new inquiry into what actually happens to us on the way to becoming capable of greater things.
There is a peculiar distortion that can occur when we look at excellence from the outside.
We see the company after it has succeeded, the book after it has been written, the artist after she has developed a recognizable voice, the entrepreneur after he has learned to lead. We encounter finished works (or at least the most recent mature version of a work), and we begin looking backward for the qualities that explain how it came to be.
We name important skills and traits of character that resulted in the excellence we see: Discipline. Vision. Courage. Talent. Persistence. All of these may be true. Yet they can also obscure something much more interesting and perhaps more important —
The person who ultimately accomplished the excellence was not necessarily the person who began it.
Somewhere along the way, the work changed them.
This is the territory I want to explore with Excellence Becoming, my new podcast launching today on Apple Podcasts.
This is an exploration of excellence as a journey and process of formation, as an ongoing encounter between a human being, reality, and something difficult enough to require more than someone knew how to give beforehand.
We Often Tell Stories of Excellence Backward
One of the reasons I wanted to create this show is that I think we have become remarkably good at documenting achievement and considerably less good at understanding the process of becoming - and this is what interest me most. It’s wonderful to know humans can be heroes. It’s even grander to know we can stretch ourselves and learn to be heroic ourselves.
However, most “success stories” are often told backwards.
Once we know that someone eventually built the company, survived the crisis, found the mission, developed the idea, or created the masterpiece, the earlier confusion becomes strangely orderly in retrospect.
The mistake becomes “the lesson.” The failure becomes “the turning point.” However, they more often than not did not feel that way when someone was living them.
When the company was failing, its founder did not yet know whether this would someday become the failure she credited with changing how she led.
When the experiment failed, nobody arrived from the future to explain that this particular disappointment would prove indispensable.
In the moment, people have to decide and act before they knew what the experience will ultimately mean. And this, I think, is where much of excellence is actually formed: in the messy middle.
Catalytic Adversity
I have been thinking recently about a phrase for a particular kind of experience, and I’m calling it:
Catalytic Adversity
By this terms, I do not mean that suffering automatically makes us better, because clearly it does not. People can experience enormous adversity and come away defeated not larger. Sometimes this even our own doing. We can repeat the same mistakes, protect the same assumptions, blame the same circumstances, and emerge from an experience more defended against reality rather than more capable of engaging with it.
However, there is a kind of adversity that becomes catalytic when it precipitates change. Perhaps reality reveals that an assumption we have been carrying is wrong. Perhaps we discover that one of our strengths has become a limitation in a different context. Perhaps the challenge before us requires courage, judgment, patience, imagination, humility, discipline, or responsibility that pushes us to grow.
That can create an extraordinary moment in a human life.
We can reduce the challenge until it fits the capacities we already possess. Or we can allow the challenge to call forth capacities we do not possess yet.
This is the possibility that fascinates me. Because if we choose it, in the right circumstances, adversity can become our gift.
The Work Forms the Worker
There is a line from speaker and creator Jay Acunzo that I love:
“When you make better things, you tend to make things better.”
Yes, 100 %!
AND
I increasingly find myself wanting to add another movement to the idea:
When you devote yourself to making better things, you often make yourself better in the process.
The work forms the worker.
Try to build something sufficiently difficult and worthwhile and eventually you will encounter the frontier of your existing capacities: You will not know enough. You will make the wrong call. Your courage will fail in the moment. Your standards will exceed your current skill. Reality will answer back.
And now the pursuit becomes more than a project for the world. It becomes formative of you as a creator.
The Virtuous Spiral of Excellence
This is where I think we can begin to see excellence differently.
Imagine that you undertake a worthy challenge.
Because the challenge matters, you attempt to meet it at a high standard. Eventually, doing so exposes some inadequacy in your present capacities. You reflect, adjust, learn, try again and then again. Perhaps you become more discerning through this process, more courageous, more skillful, more patient, more responsible.
You return to the work again as a slightly different, better version of yourself.
Now you can make something you could not have made before. This greater capacity now allows for greater contribution. Greater contribution, of course, brings greater responsibility, which presents greater challenges. And those challenges once again ask you to become something more.
Challenge → becoming → contribution → greater challenge → greater becoming.
A virtuous spiral.
This is one of the ideas at the heart of what I mean by Worthy Excellence.
The pursuit of excellence is not simply the accumulation of achievements. Nor is self-development something that happens privately before we go out and do meaningful things in the world.
The two are, ultimately, inseparable. We develop ourselves through worthy engagement with the world. We build something worthy, including ourselves.
What Happens to a Person on the Way to Becoming More and More Excellent?
This brings me to the question underneath the new show:
What actually happens to a person on the way to greater excellence?
I am far less interested in extracting another set of “success habits” from accomplished people than I am in understanding their formation.
- What did they once believe / do that they no longer can?
- What did failure teach them that success could not?
- What did they have to relinquish?
- Where did reality refuse to cooperate with their plans?
- Who were they before challenge came along, and who became possible because they accepted it?
Those are the stories I want to hear.
And I suspect that if we collect enough of them, examine them carefully enough, and compare what we observe across very different lives, we may begin to understand something important about how human excellence actually develops.
That makes Excellence Becoming more than a podcast to me.
It is another instrument of inquiry.
And, ultimately, I want you in the conversation
This is also why I have decided that, starting in October, the future of Excellence Becoming will be deeply connected with The Worthy Excellence Institute here on Substack.
Future long-form interviews will take us much deeper into individual journeys of becoming. Whenever possible, I’ll record those conversations as Substack livestreams right here, which means you won’t merely encounter the finished interview afterward: You’ll be able to join us live.
You can listen as the conversation unfolds, notice what strikes you, and bring your own questions into the inquiry.
I’ll also be starting a weekly Monday Morning Question here as a livestream, a short activating reflection built around a question I am genuinely thinking about in my own pursuit and study of excellence.
These will not be “lectures” in which I arrive with answers. The point is disciplined inquiry.
I want to bring you into the questions I am wrestling with, share what I am observing, and then create space for you to examine the question against the reality of your own life and work.
Over time, I hope something rather unusual can develop here: not simply an audience consuming ideas about excellence, but a community becoming increasingly skilled at observing it, questioning it, practicing it, and contributing to our understanding of it.
That is precisely what I want The Worthy Excellence Institute to become.
For Today, Begin With One Story
Today, however, we begin with stories.
Excellence Becoming is officially live on Apple Podcasts.
For the opening Becoming collection, I invited sixteen entrepreneurs, authors, creators, and other accomplished leaders to sit down with me for a short conversation around one question:
What is one failure, mistake, challenge, or struggle that, however difficult in the moment, ultimately made you capable of greater excellence?
Each conversation is deliberately bite-sized—generally around 5–10 minutes.
Together, however, they begin to create a mosaic of becoming: different people, different lives, different challenges, all offering us another opportunity to look beneath the polished surface of achievement and ask what actually forms a human being capable of greater excellence.
So that is my invitation to you today.
Choose one.
Find the title or person or story that catches your attention. Listen all the way through. Ask yourself what you notice. Or listen to two. Or five. Follow whatever makes you curious.
Then bring those observations back here, because this is where the larger conversation will continue.
Throughout September, Excellence Becoming is available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.
Listen to the Excellence Becoming launch collection on Apple Podcasts
We have a great deal still to discover about what excellence asks of us - and who we might become in answering.
