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O P I N I O N
In pursuit of excellence
Have a purpose and commit to mastery and excellence and you will find happiness both personally and professionally.
W e consistently hear about millennials being lazy and unfocused. This bleeds into other generational groups as well. In fact, while crafting firms’ strategic plans, I often hear about QA/QC issues. Leaders in firms lament about how they must pay extra attention because the workforce today doesn’t have the same attention to detail, reverence for quality, and doesn’t understand how that affects client relationships. These are simply symptoms at the periphery of the core issue. What has seemed to shift is the focus on true mastery of your chosen profession and a willingness to look internally to develop an individual and collective morality in the pursuit of excellence.
Phil Keil
Making a commitment to mastery and excellence will make your life a lot simpler. It will take away excuses and reasons for your leadership to doubt you. Filter your actions through a personally driven mission, vision, and value lens. These should align with the firm you have chosen to dedicate your time to. If it doesn’t, you probably aren’t working for the right firm or the right people. I hear a lot about work-life balance and flextime policies these days which partially, in my opinion, is to pursue temporary pleasures. I’m not saying that there aren’t very important reasons for having this balance as most people define it. Not only will mastery, excellence, and moral purpose
help you professionally, but also in your individual pursuit of happiness. In a previous life, I started a medical device firm with the purpose of treating clinical depression. In this capacity I learned just how severe and to what magnitude people around the world are suffering. Whether you come to the realization through a religious worldview, through enlightenment reasoning, or other methods, happiness is moral purpose. That purpose you’ve chosen is the profession and activities you are dedicating your life to. In fact, Aristotle defined happiness in a life well-lived. To him, something was good if it
See PHIL KEIL, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER July 8, 2019, ISSUE 1303
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