My friend Brian Tinkler, acknowledged Sales Ninja and all around good guy introduced me to Stephen Covey, John Maxwell, Brian Tracy, and other authors who write on the subjects of leadership, effectiveness, productivity, and various other Good Things ™. One principle many of these people tease out but do not always call by name is the idea of Excellence. Excellence and commitment to improvement are the notions that keep many people from "getting" things like the 7 Habits. They try something for a while, its hard, they give up. The next day at the water cooler: "That self-improvement stuff is crap."
Of all the principles espoused by these authors and others, the notion of Excellence is very much on my mind these days. Let me explain, starting with a note of humility: I have always thought of myself as "one of the elite" and to be fair I do pretty well. My increased participation in the the local .NET user group in all of its various forms has put me in front of more and more people. One thing I've heard many times is "Hey that was a good post/idea/bit of code Damon but you broke XYZ best practice in this part." The vast majority of the time, the best practice is something I am aware of. Be it Lazy coding practice, "I just want to get this post out so people can look at it", or "I just want to make this deadline", one's work is a reflection of one's self and one's values. Wanting to do well and being able to do well are not the same as doing excellent work consistently and conciously.
This simply won't do. No one is perfect. A programmer who always designes the right patterns, with adequate comments, with the proper unit tests, who looked for a tool first, who takes the time to refactor properly, who thinks about something before they start writing it, who creates UML artifacts to represent a complex interaction, who follows every best practice they can think of, who is a "good citizen", this person is a rare individual indeed, but that doesn't mean you should stop working towards it. I would argue that in all but the most extreme circumstances one's core Habits and even core mindset can be changed. It takes concious and constant effort, and the ability to face the ugliest parts of yourself and beat it, disallow it from ruling you. For example: I hate litter. There are people in the world who throw their McDonald's bag out the window with no concious thought. Most people have a momentary flash of a Devil on one shoulder and Angel on the other and they allow the dude with the red suit and 6-pack of Ham's to win. They don't face and defeat the ugly part.
I argue that the fundamental paradox surrounding these bag-tossers is not that they are breaking the rules someone else has laid in front of them, but that they are acting contrary to a value set that they themselves believe in. Living up to one's own notion of the human experience is, strangely, an Herculean endeavor for most of us. A commitment to excellence requires one to face down one's bad habits with every single action and to know that a defeat here and there is unavoidable but to let that defeat push you back down the hill, or back to tossing bags, or back to just putting in that one little hack, is the worst sin of all. It is a terrible burden to know that you are truly capable of living up to your ideals, but it is also liberating and motivating.
Today I did the Right Thing and refactored a complex design rather than add an "if (name.Equals("SkipMe")) " type of line of code. I came home and played with my daughter for a very long time despite the pile of work waiting for me, I came home and wrote a Bugzilla report rather than send an IM to the programmer, I did the tedious testing that was necessary because only I could do it. I did not publish a library I've been working on "as is" becaue I have decided the Right Thing is to refactor it to fit an appropriate Provider model Microsoft allows for this type of code in the .NET framework. I'm taking those shortcuts less and less, improving my research methods, getting more work done, and producing designs I really want to share with people. No one will believe you can do great things if they've only seen your mediocre work. You will not believe you can do great work if you keep letting yourself do mediocre work. My thanks to the many Excellent people I know, being around you is a benevolent push that reminds me to strive every day for more Excellence in my life.