Something is congealing. I have been so despairing lately of finding Excellent and Quality in every day life.

And then I was challenged regarding those definitions, and told that intuition would be a better guide for finding and defining these traits.

INTUITION! Oh please.

Really?

Really?

so we start with a search for a better definition, a more precise or usable definition..and end up with a measurement that is totally useless.

Or at least totally amorphous.

Which is sort of mockingly useless. Like “If you were more intuitive, you would understand how to use intuition to deal with your life.”

So. Intuition was blocked, so I thought more about quality and excellence.

So, I want to do something excellent. And I want to do quality work.

Side bar: I imagine it is possible to do something excellent that is not very good quality. For example,  Eggers wrote an excellent book (excellent because of the way he got it out there and how many people were affected by it) _A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius_, but I don’t think it was very good quality writing. I read another book _The Stone Diaries_, which is very high quality writing but not an excellent story.

All right. Perhaps Excellence must be coupled with vision. Someone or a group of someones must have the vision of the thing, the Stuff (item, organization, product) that will be excellent. Then the quality of that is to be worked out in practice, but the Vision is the start, and the persistence of vision keeps the excellent idea moving towards its excellent execution.

i have visions every day that i don’t execute. Execution must be coupled with Excellence

So then, for the life cycle of excellent, we have Vision,  Execution, and Excellence

Maybe.

And then today. Out of nearly nowhere, I hear somebody talking to me about “nature”

as in, my nature, the nature of who I am

aw crap. Is that intuition again?

No, this one smells different. They are cousins, though.

It is my nature to do the things I always end up doing.

In my case, that means striking up conversations with strangers.

I LOVE that.

and it also means having a set of things I want to work on and accomplish in a day, and being proud of the high quality work I’ve done at the end of the day while planning the next day’s work

It is against my nature to go limp and  not run full out towards a goal.

I think that when I go against my nature, the cognitive dissonance is so clanging that I have trouble hearing my intuition.

which is what makes it so hard for me to figure this intuition thing out

So here I go again.

I intuitively act according to my nature. I am in tune with myself when I do what comes

NATURALLY

to me.

If I am doing something that does not come naturally, then I am constantly tamping down my own alarm system–my intuition–to continue behaving unnaturally.

IF, however, I do what comes naturally, i can then begin to respond in my own unique way to people around me.

It is OK for me to act like myself

it is acceptable for me to act like myself

It is in fact

THE BEST EXPRESSION OF THE GLORY OF GOD FOR ME TO ACT LIKE MYSELF

which is to say:

I ought to lean into this acting-like-myself thing. I ought to run after it

LIKE I”M BEING CHASED

because, after all, that it my nature. To do it hard.

and also, it’s a spec. It’s a requirement.

Like, I would say no if someone suggested that I stay up for 36 hours and not sleep.

I can’t do that.

And if someone suggests that I not pursue my vision of excellence…

I can’t do that.

I would have to say no.