Mykhailo Repuzhynskyi/Shutterstock
What does it mean to be good at your job? Many higher education professionals would describe high performance with abstract concepts, such as a commitment to student success or achieving excellence in teaching or research.
Even when you tie your work to productivity metrics and key indicators like retention rates or journal publications, defining excellence can be arbitrary. It depends on who is judging. Higher education, like many other knowledge-work professions, lacks objective standards.
“Ask certain white-collar professionals what it means to do a good job at the office, and odds are they may need a least a few minutes to explain the answer, accounting for politics, the opinions of their boss, the mood of a client, the role of their teammates, and the variety of other external factors,” wrote Brad Stulberg, a best-selling author and executive coach.
Moving beyond the binary, success-or-failure standard that doesn’t capture the realities of knowledge work — and avoiding the overly abstract principles that are common in self-help literature — Stulberg offers a practical guide to excelling at your job in his recent book “The Way of Excellence.”
What Is Excellence?
Excellence is neither reaching perfection nor cultivating some vague, enlightened state of mind.
Stulberg defines excellence as “involved engagement in something worthwhile that supports your values and goals.” It combines mastery and mattering.
Before pursuing excellence, you must define your values and goals. Stulberg suggests asking yourself: What are your guiding principles? What qualities would older and wiser you be proud of? What tradeoffs will you make if any two values or goals conflict with one another?
If you don’t define your own values and goals, someone else will. Don’t succumb to supporting the goals and values of your institution or boss — or anyone willing to hire you. Claim your excellence, then find your way.
Here are some takeaways from “The Way of Excellence,” starting with three wayward pursuits to avoid and ending with three paths toward meaningful work and career fulfillment.
Don’t Just Go with the Flow
Many professionals attempt to achieve a flow state in their work. This means becoming so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. That has benefits if you are testing samples in a lab or writing a paper, but as Stulberg points out, flow is values-neutral and agnostic to the future. You can get into the flow of answering emails or scrolling social media. Excellence must be pointed toward something that matters to you. It must be deeply connected to the core of your job. If those required tasks don’t support your values and goals, then it may be time to have a conversation with your supervisor or explore other jobs.
Escape From Single Identity
Don’t let what you do become who you are. If you are only a certain type of professor and then you lose your job, that can be catastrophic to the pursuit of excellence, let alone your mental health. Even within an occupation or a role, there can be fixed identities that could be immediately disrupted by the loss of a budget line or curricular change. Instead, diversify your sources of meaning and identity in your life. When you do, you are more resilient and better able to adapt to change.
Two Traps of Goal-Setting
Making big and meaningful goals can sometimes lead you astray and become counterproductive. Stulberg identified two traps of goal-setting: 1.) tricking yourself into believing that just because you set a goal, something within you has changed, and 2.) becoming so fixated on achieving your goal that you rush the process, making poor decisions along the way, thus damaging your credibility, relationships, or well-being.
Be the Best at Getting Better
Many people think of excellence as being the best. But, as Stulberg points out, that type of outcomes-based pursuit of success is not only fleeting but finite. You either get there or you don’t, and even if you do, it’s a flash in time — it comes, and then it goes. Excellence is an infinite game. “Instead focus on being the best at getting better,” Stulberg wrote. “That’s a commitment to mastery that lasts a lifetime.”
Use Renewable Energy
What motivates people to play the infinite game is curiosity and joy. To figure out what you are capable of, to better know your craft, to know and express yourself, to create, to grow — these are all fueled by curiosity and are part and parcel to excellence. Unlike dirty, negative energy, like avenging slights or proving people wrong, another clean and renewable source of energy is joy. “If you find yourself losing joy and getting caught up in obsession, come back to your overarching purpose for doing the work,” Stulberg wrote.
Two Shifts of the Long Game
Because excellence is an infinite game, it must be sustained throughout an entire career. That means making adjustments to prioritize 1.) your highest contribution through wisdom and mentorship, and 2.) your greatest fulfillment through community and belonging. Research has shown that raw ability and “fluid” intelligence to generate ideas peaks early in your career, but as you age, you are better able to leverage your “crystalized” intelligence by mentoring and relying on your collective wisdom to connect ideas. The people you connect with also matters. “Prioritizing community may feel inefficient in the short term, but in the long term, it is one of the most efficient things there is,” Stulberg wrote. “Be wary of getting so caught up in self-driven optimization that you sacrifice belonging.”
In Conclusion
Being good at your job is not simply meeting metrics, pleasing supervisors, or chasing an ever-changing definition of success. It is choosing to engage in work that aligns with your values, contributes meaningfully to your communities, and commits you to continual growth. Excellence is not assigned; it is practiced. It’s not abstract; it is personal. How you pursue excellence goes a long way in your career.
