You want to pursue excellence. You know you should. You’ve read the books, attended the training, made the commitments.
So why don’t you?
This isn’t a question about knowledge. You know what to do. It’s not about capability. You can do it. The question is why capable people, who genuinely want to be excellent, keep choosing to settle.
What causes, this, what’s happening? It’s all in your mind.
You’re fighting your own wiring. Neuroscience research shows that human beings are wired to move toward what feels good now and away from what feels painful. Excellence requires doing hard things, they take time, and the payoff is delayed.
Preparing for that meeting or review is painful, it takes time. Winging it, somehow seems easier. Asking deeper questions takes effort now, moving to the pitch is productive and aligns with our metrics. Honest self-reflection is uncomfortable now. Moving on to the next causes you to avoid asking those tough questions.
This isn’t a character flaw. It’s how brains work. Every time you choose excellence, you’re overriding your own wiring. That’s why it is so hard.
You believe you’re the exception. Behavioral neuroscientist Dr. Tali Sharot’s research reveals something counterintuitive: people believe that warnings, risks, and consequences don’t apply to them. You think you and your situation is different.
That’s why you can know the math, that small shortcuts compound into massive gaps over time, and still take the shortcut. Deep down, you believe you’ll be the one person who escapes the consequences. You’ll be fine. The cost of settling is real, but it won’t apply to you.
Until it does.
The immediate/urgent always beats the important. When you’re faced with a choice between what’s easy now and what’s better long-term, you are biased to what’s easy and immediate. You revel in the short dopamine hit. The easy choice feels concrete and certain. The better choice feels abstract and distant.
While we know we have to change, we defer it, telling ourselves, “I’ll start tomorrow. I’ll prepare more thoroughly for the next meeting. I’ll reflect on that loss later. I’ll build better habits next quarter.”
And the changes we “commit to” never come. We don’t start tomorrow, next quarter we don’t build the better habits. The settling becomes habit.
Then some day, you reflect and wonder how you got here.
Social gravity pulls you down. When you pursue excellence in an environment where most people are going through the motions, your standards implicitly challenge theirs. You don’t have to say a word. Your preparation, your curiosity, your accountability; they make others’ mediocrity more visible.
The social cost, the pressure of being different or standing out, feels high. So you tone it down. You fit in, go with the flow, settle.
How do you break through, how do you stop settling?
Knowing why you settle doesn’t automatically change it. Your brain still has the same wiring. You still believe you’re the exception. Tomorrow still feels like a better day to start.
So what actually works?
Stop relying on how you feel. You will rarely feel like pursuing excellence. Doing things the way you and everyone around you is always more comfortable, than the change, the uncertainty, the risk. Winging it will always feel easier than preparing.
The people who achieve excellence aren’t more motivated. They’ve learned to act despite not feeling like it. They’ve separated the action from the feeling.
Make the “excellence” choice the default. Every decision you have to make is an opportunity to succumb to mediocrity. You have to consciously choose excellence. You have to choose it every day in everything you do. Building habits and routines so excellence becomes automatic. Preparation before every meeting, follow-through on every commitment, reflection at the end of every day.
When you don’t have to decide, you don’t have to fight your brain, which may be telling you that you are doing good enough.
Shorten the feedback loop. The exception delusion thrives when consequences are distant. Bring them closer. Don’t wait for quarterly reviews. At the end of each day, ask yourself: Where did I settle? Where did I pursue excellence?
Daily honesty makes the cost of settling immediate and real.
Change your environment. Social gravity is powerful. If the people around you are settling, you’ll drift toward settling. Find people who are pursuing excellence, hang out with them, learn from them. Their standards will pull you up instead of down.
You become like the people you surround yourself with.
Connect to something that matters. Excellence for its own sake rarely sustains us. But excellence in service of something you care about, your customers’ success, your own growth, the professional life you want to build. This can override the wiring.
When the why is strong enough, you find a way through the discomfort of how.
The discipline of daily excellence.
These tactics help. But underneath all of them is something more fundamental.
You won’t change all at once. You won’t stop believing you’re the exception through sheer logic. You won’t eliminate the pull toward what’s easy.
But you can build the habits that make excellence your default.
This is where discipline comes in. Not motivation, discipline. Motivation is a feeling, and feelings are unreliable. Discipline is showing up and doing the work whether you feel like it or not.
It’s preparing thoroughly for the meeting that doesn’t seem important. It’s following through on the small commitment nobody would notice if you dropped. It’s doing your prospecting when your pipeline looks healthy. It’s reflecting on the loss when you’d rather move on.
None of these feel urgent in the moment. All of them compound over time.
The people who achieve excellence aren’t doing dramatic things. They’re doing ordinary things with extraordinary consistency. They’ve built habits around the fundamentals, not because someone is watching, but because they’re driven to be better than they were yesterday.
That drive doesn’t come from guilt or pressure. It comes from caring, about your work, your customers, your own potential. When you care enough, discipline stops feeling like punishment. It becomes the way you express that care.
So the question isn’t whether you’ll feel like pursuing excellence tomorrow. You probably won’t.
The question is whether you’ll show up and do the work. Starting now.
Afterword: An outstanding AI based discussion on this post. This is another in a series leading to the launch of my new book, Is ‘Good Enough’ Good Enough, Mindsets and Behaviors for Sales Excellence. It is launching in mid December, 2025. Enjoy!
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