Excellence is not hustle-culture bullshit. It is not waking up at 4 AM to cold plunge and telling everyone about it. It is not a restrictive diet. It is not a chest-thumping act of look how great I am. It is not sacrificing your soul or bending the knee to make as much money as possible.

Excellence is throwing yourself fully into things that support your values. It is caring deeply and giving your all. It is making the most of your unique gifts. It is hard work. Creating. Contributing. Integrity. Character. It is standing up for what you believe in.

@BRADSTULBERG

Today on LinkedIn, I saw Will Samson repost Brad’s quote with this message:

“Excellence is not my ability to mimic others, but my willingness to earn fidelity to myself.”

Both Brad and Will put words to something I’ve felt for years but rarely hear said out loud. Probably because most people are too busy performing excellence to actually practice it.

And maybe that’s why Brad’s definition resonates.

A return to values, gifts, contribution. Nothing you can turn into a 30-day challenge but just you deciding to live in a way that doesn’t make you betray yourself.

I’ve noticed this in my work for a long time, and maybe that’s why I keep remembering things Jason Leister shared with me years ago. Jason coached me through two very different seasons of my life, and he has this quiet philosophy that I have passed along to many a client.

Nobody can hand you “the way.” You figure it out by living. By trying. By getting it wrong and noticing why. By discovering that your wiring refuses to do things simply because someone else swears by it.

There’s something freeing about that… and also mildly annoying… because it cancels the fantasy that someone out there has the perfect template you can just download and follow. Which brings me back to the Brad–Will combination. It underlines the same truth in a different language — if you aren’t loyal to yourself, nothing you build will hold.

Loyalty to yourself is not a feeling.

It’s practice. It’s the choices you stop outsourcing. It’s the parts of yourself you stop negotiating away for the sake of appearing focused, disciplined, “excellent.”

When you strip away the cold plunges, the performative productivity and the endless mimicking, what’s left is the thing most people run from: your values, sitting there, waiting for you to take them seriously. Waiting for you to build a life that makes sense for you. Waiting for you to acknowledge that excellence without alignment is just another form of self-abandonment dressed up as ambition.

And maybe that’s the part we should be paying attention to… not the rituals, not the optics, not the aesthetics of being impressive… but the quiet honesty of whether we’re actually living in a way that reflects who we are.

Nothing tidy to resolve here. Just the uncomfortable, grounding truth that fidelity is earned and excellence grows from the inside out — never the other way around.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

Which part of your life or work have you been trying to “improve” by mimicking someone else?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, MCODE® Legacy Coach, writer and musician. I help leaders and independent professionals close the gap between strategy and execution by making invisible friction visible, so direction can finally translate into results.

If execution isn’t matching intent and you can’t quite see why, message me on WhatsApp. We’ll start with a brief Clarity Conversation to understand what you’re facing and decide together whether a focused Sensemaking Session is the right next step.