Excellence Essay

Brittany Wood
Grammar for College
4/30/08
Excellence Essay

On Excellence

Aristotle quoted, “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.” Many people think excellence is winning the first place trophy or getting an A in a class but my theory on excellence is very different.

Excellence to me is achieving the impossible, it is something amazing. We achieve excellence by working hard and doing the absolute best that you can, not by sitting around and hoping it will someday come to you. To achieve excellence takes alot of time and dedication.

In the story Reading Between the Lies it talks about a journalist named Jayson Blair who would take other peoples stories or just make them up. He was a well known and liked journalist until the day people started to find out about what he was doing. I think that Blair was nowhere near excellence. He let people believe that he wrote these stories when he actually didn't. In society today some people do not tolerate stealing or cheateing and some see it as achieving some sort of excellence.

People today feel alot of pressure to achieve excellence and everday jobs are a big example. I work at Avera Marshall Regional Medical Center and everyone there is striving to do better by doing the absolute best that they can. Working here has made me strive for more excellence.

As you can see excellence can not be practiced, but achieved. Some people may say achieving excellence is to do anything possible to be #1, but my view is very different. Therefore excellence to me is not something you are born with, it takes time and effort to achieve it.