Excellence

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation, we do no act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit” (Aristotle). This quote made by the famous Greek philosopher gives us an example of how we try to achieve excellence as part of our own goal in life. Because every human being is in a continual search for perfection, the state of excellance is achieved by some people who really look for it and keep searching for it as a daily routine or habit. Not evryone strives for execellence, because it puts pressure in our lives weather we like it or not, It is necessary if we are going to be successful and triumph in life.

Is preassure necessary to achieve excellence? If we start describing daily routines that we have had during the past years, we can conclude that we are in a continue search of excellence. We go to school to learn more, so that we can be prepared for college and do the best we can on the job. During our school years we need to work hard to achieve excellence. When people feel a lot of pressure to reach excellence, they sometimes cheat. Is cheating a result of these pressures for excellence? In Bill Puka’s Essay Student Cheating, he shows us how students nowadays (including me) cheat, plagiarize, and make other forms of academic dishonesty in order to achieve excellence. It is in these cases that the values of the students are left a side; consequences are not an obstacle to stop them from cheating, because grades are important and are going to determine the profession they will get into.

Values are defined as those things that really matter to each of us ... the ideas and beliefs we hold as special (pinetreeweb.com). Nancy Gibbs’s article Reading Between the Lies explains the case of Jayson Blair, a “journalist” for the New York Times who was caught after several years of making up stories. Here we have a clear example of how cheating and values did not matter, or were not an option, in order to achieve his excellence. In this case wrote a stories that could get the attention of the readers, keep them informed with interesting news articles. This brings me to the next question, how do we achieve excellence?

Excellence is the state or quality of excelling. It is superiority, or the state of being good to a high degree. Excellence is considered to be a value by many organizations, in particular, by schools and other institutions of education. It is a goal to be pursued (Wikipedia.com). I think that to attain excellence is harder for a person to achieve than for institutions, or groups of people. For example, a regular employee can achieve excellence after he receives a raise, but it won’t last to long, because that means, they are expecting more from him at his or her job. On the other hand, an institutions achievement of excellence could be easier to reach because a group of people is working together to achieve excellence.

In conclusion I think that the achievement of excellence is something does not have an ending, is a continual search to be better in a lot of aspects of our life, and the only way to achieve it is with constant work. Excellence is just a state. It will never be forever, and it depends on our searching and working for it.



Work Cited
Hoff, B. "The Crooked Tree"Ludwig, M. D. (2004) "Look out for more Blairs"
Puka, B. (2005) "Student Cheating: As Serious an Academic Integrity Problem as Faculty Administration Business as Usual?"
Gibbs, N. (2003) "reading Between the Lies: A young reporter who stole and made up stories forces the New York Times to take stock"