A Measure of Excellence

Creation as a virtue

How do you achieve excellence? How do you measure excellence? What even is excellence?

Here’s my definition, a partial borrowing from Aristotle:

Excellence is the dedicated and fruitful pursuit of virtue. Those who are virtuous are excellent.

What is virtuous? For this question I prefer to borrow from Nietzsche:

What is virtuous is that which overflows, that which creates, that which is abundant and life-affirming. Virtuosity is measured in the will to imprint what is good and valuable onto the world. What is good and valuable is relative, they say! - but we all know beauty, don’t we? Poor is the man who doesn’t know beauty, robbed by his stubbornness and allegiance to ir-rationality.

So here’s where I land on “What is excellent?” and “How do you measure excellence?”

What is excellent is the dedicated and fruitful pursuit of creation and abundance. The pursuit of excellence is the pursuit of good, the pursuit of what is valuable, and the pursuit of beauty. The measure of one’s excellence is the vigor of one’s pursuit.

Now - How to achieve excellence?

Every day, people make things. Some people make things for the first time - a first movement, a first essay, a first commit. Some people make things for the last time - a final breath, a final kiss, a final bon travail. Some of us sink deep into the churning middles of our creative lives, wrestling with our génie in hopes that she might forfeit to us something good to share today.

What is left behind? What evidence is there that we have lived? What is good and valuable and beautiful that we have pulled from the ether and imprinted onto the world?

I propose the artifact as the de-facto mode of achieving excellence.

What is an artifact? An artifact is a product of creation. A drawing, a youtube video, a pull request. It’s the manifestation of a creator’s intent, channeled into being. It’s a stamp on the world.

Artifacts carry weight. They take up space. If you take two people, one with a great many artifacts and the other with none, and you measure the impact that those two people have had, the person with the more artifacts will almost certainly have had a greater impact. Those who create over and above themselves have a sort of metaphysical gravity that’s hard to resist, and they overwhelm others simply with the volume and density of their ideas. If you think that you have the best ideas, the best art, and the best systems (and why shouldn’t you?) then will them into being! 

If you don’t have the best ideas, the best art, or the best systems, then work tirelessly to forge them. That too requires making artifacts. There is nothing more tantalizing to a man, virtuous or not, than a bad artifact. If you want excellence in your ideas, publish and preach - “Behold! My great ideas!” and wait for the critiques. This battlefield is where you learn to paint what you see and mean what you say.

Artifacts are a meaningful proxy for virtuosity. What virtuosity would Socrates have had if not for Plato?¹ How can I know you are virtuous and good if you do not show me with your creations?

Many of the greats know this. They toil for years until they find their excellence, and then they keep creating.

The Beatles released 229 songs in 7 years. Unreleased songs push that number over 300. Over 4 years on tour, they played 1,400 concerts. In the years 1957-1962, before signing their first record deal, they played over 600 shows.

Van Gogh was active for only 10 years before an early death. During that time, he made over 900 paintings and over 1,100 drawings and sketches. Georgia O’Keefe produced more than 2,000 paintings over her career, despite quitting painting for several long stretches of her life.

Jon Skeet has consistently hit several thousand contributions each year over the last decade on github, while writing several books, publishing dozens of detailed articles, and answering 35,683 questions for struggling devs on Stack Overflow. Linus Torvalds, the inventor of linux and git, has a similar level of activity, and keeps it up year after year.

Isaac Asimov wrote over 500 books, 380 short stories, and about 90,000 letters and postcards.

The act of creation refines your ability to create. It’s a muscle that needs to be worked and developed, and the best way to do that is volume. Create! The best way to learn French is to speak French, constantly, surrounded by French people. The best way to lift heavy weights is not to read fitness books and watch fitness influencers, it’s to lift heavy weights. The best way to paint a masterpiece is to paint a thousand pieces first. Whatever you aspire to do, likely the shortest path there is to just do it, many times.

Do not be shy, do not be wary. Understand that there is a great gap between you and who you want to be. A first movement is what you need, a cracking of the shell, a rub of the waking eyes. The creator who creates most and creates best once created first, and that virtuous soul gains momentum with each artifact, until they are fluent in creation, they are virtuous, and they are excellent.

1. Socrates famously never wrote anything down, but his students, including Plato, documented many of his dialogues, which constitute most of the knowledge we have of him today.