Excellence Is To Be Superior In Quality

An army general, William Foster (1917-1945) said “Quality never happens by chance, it is always the result of high intention.”  So, quality is never going to come by you sitting around and hoping for the best. It will only come by design, by you maintaining a standard of quality. It means we have to purpose in our hearts to do excellence works. You make it a point never to compromise the quality of your work.

There was once a hunter who was out hunting for a bear. He met a bear. The bear said to him, “I want a full stomach. I am hungry.” The hunter said, “I want a fur coat.” So the bear told the hunter, “Let’s compromise.” The hunter agreed and the bear gobbled up the hunter. As a result, both of them got what they wanted. The bear got a full stomach and the hunter was wrapped in fur coat.

This hunter learned the lesson of compromise. The call of God for your life and mine is always a call to excellence – never a call to mediocrity. We got to understand this - the God we serve is an excellent God. He is not a God who compromise excellence. He is a God of beauty and a glorious God. If we are created in the image and likeness of God, that means we are to be like Him. So, anything is worth doing, it means it is worth doing it well and excellently.

Someone has said this before, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when you will have time to do it over?” Sometime, you have an employee who will come to the boss and submit a piece of work. The boss asked what kind of work is this. It was so sloppy and incomplete. The employee then told the boss that he didn’t have time to do it well. If the employee didn’t have time to do it well, when would he have the time to do it again? This is second strike mentality that we have to get out of our mind. We have to tell ourselves that if we are going to do something, we are going to do it well the first time. Do it with one strike and not second strike all the time.

Let’s look at an example of a contractor who has to do some renovations in the house for you. He was a nice guy, doesn’t smoke, and always speak politely. You called the contractor and he said he didn’t have time to come down to do it. When he did, it was at a time when you are not at home. You got home and found that the fixtures were not working well. The door to your bedroom could not close properly. He came back, fixed it and put in a new drawer for you. Then you found that the drawer’s door could not close and was stuck. He had to keep coming back again and again to fix the things that he put in the first time which were not working. Look, he didn’t do his work in the first strike and it was always the second strike. Do you think you will use this contractor again for other works or recommend to another friend? No. Even if he is a nice person, he is not going to get repeated jobs. In your work, your promotion will not come because of your nice character. Your promotion and success come when you produce an excellent work. And you are not asked to come back again the second time with your work. Every time you do something, you do it right the first time.

Details determine your destiny. Don’t allow compromise to creep in and destroy you. You can’t say that I will compromise only in this one area and this small area will not affect you. You are wrong. Once compromise has a foothold, it will come in and it will spread. In the United States, the experts were doing a study of what you called a quality of life crime. It is a study of life crimes like vandalism. They came up with a theory called the “Broken Windows Hypothesis”. The hypothesis is leave a broken window unrepaired and soon the rest of the windows will be broken. So if you leave a broken window unrepaired, it gives a signal that this place is in disorder or at least disorder is tolerated. The hypothesis suggests that when you compromise, disorder will invite even more disorder. For example, if you have a worker who comes in late for work, soon you will the whole office of workers who come in late for work. If you have a church that doesn’t start on time, soon you will have people who don’t come to service on time. But if the church service starts on time whether it is rain or shine, soon people will see that the service will start on time even if the seats are not filled up. People will then make an effort to come to church on time. Dr. Edwin Louis Cole (1922-2002) said, “When you start on time, you are rewarding virtue…if you start late, you are rewarding vice.”

Songs of Solomon 2:15 says “Catch us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines, for our vines have tender grapes.” This means that often it is the little details, the little compromise you made that spoil the vines. In summary, thinking with excellence means you don’t compromise on the quality, you don’t compromise in your life.