A culture of excellence
I was fortunate to visit Japan over the past few weeks and the biggest thing was how polite everyone was and the amount of excellence that was exuded in their everyday life.
At a restaurant, service is not only quick but from the moment you walk into when you leave, the experience was a masterclass in how we should approach life—striving and cultivating excellence.
The little things add up and the idea of how you do something is how you do everything was in full force. It reminded me that excellence is internal and it’s something you must enforce on yourself in order to reach new heights. You must not only speak about it, you must live it daily.
Set standards
We ate at a popular place where it wasn’t a surprise to wait an hour or two to get in. It was a smaller restaurant, run by the chef and a waitress. Once we got in, we saw that there were a few spots open for four people but only one person occupied it. There was a group of 4 people behind us so we were wondering why they didn’t just let them go in first. I saw that each customer, whether they were in groups or not, got treated with the same respect. Everyone waited in line so it would be disrespectful to have someone skip in front of them.
Everything was made to order, ensuring it was fresh and hot. There were some restaurants that took orders ahead of time and got it to you when you sat down to maximize the amount of customers that came in. But there’s something special about watching a master chef create something in front of your eyes. It’s special to know it wasn’t just sitting there for a while.
It’s the little details like this that opened my eyes to how standards are set at amazing restaurants. This was something we needed to emulate—set standards and don’t ever betray them.
Standards, values, morals, or whatever you call them are like lifting weights—you start slow and build up, consistently, and over time, you’ll see results. If you’re someone that is a habitual procrastinator, is it realistic for you to set 4 hours of uninterrupted work every day when you wake up at 5am? Probably setting the goal of trying to do 10-15 minutes of productive work might be more plausible.
Whatever it is you set for yourself, start small so you can build it into your identity. When you become someone that does not change for short-term incentives, you become formidable.
Start with you and then the culture
Perhaps the biggest driver of all of this greatness is the culture of the environment. If you were surrounded by people that are passionate about what they were doing and were driven, wouldn’t you become the same? Wouldn’t you want to cultivate that environment?
The problem is that the path to that culture is extremely difficult. Which is why the culture must start with yourself first.
I had a doctor tell us how bad smoking was and that good health was the upmost important thing to focus on because a healthy body will lead to a healthy mind and spirit. I saw him later during lunch break, smoking cigarettes. Needless to say, I didn’t take him seriously after that.
Convincing others is difficult but convincing yourself isn’t too bad. Just the first few weeks will be rough because you’re trying to forgo bad habits and behaviors for better ones. You’ll try to interfere with the status quo but once you get over that stump, the new culture is one where there’s continuous improvement. That’s the new standard.
Understand that only by working with others can you get a multiplier effect. So you now have to find people who either meet your standards or are better than you. This is even tougher because why would people do better than you want to associate themselves with someone who doesn’t bring much to the table?
That’s when the plan to continuously upgrade yourself becomes important. People with high status and money make themselves more altruistic because that will build their reputation and give them access to even “better” people. Unless you were lucky enough to go to a private institution and build relationships at an early age, it’s hard to get into the club.
Build your skillset and find a way to bring value to whoever you meet. Try to do something that other people don’t want to do and see where that gets you.
I had a friend who would take notes at meetings and send them out afterward. He promptly got invited to important meetings, learned key insights, and networked with top-level executives. Nobody wanted to take notes, so he simply designated himself and got rewarded handsomely for it.
Any friction is good
In video games, whenever you’ve encountered tough enemies, you know you’re going the right way. It’s the same as trying to build new skills or developing good habits, you’ll run into resistance. It could come from other people trying to defer, or it’ll be yourself trying to fight change.
Perhaps an evolutionary biologist can sum it up better than I can, but the human body and mind hate it whenever you’re trying to change and work hard. It seems more content with relaxing and exerting little effort. You’ll do anything you can to justify staying put and conserving energy. Even if you know certain activities will make you better, you’ll still find ways to not do it.
Even if you do push the threshold of doing more, there will still be days when it’s a struggle. If you have a 9 am-5 pm job, the option of waking up at 6 am to work out or waiting until after a long day of work to go to the gym isn’t the most enticing option. You wouldn’t be wrong to say I’ve earned a day of rest. But then one day becomes days, and that’s when you start to fall off.
If you are to skip one day, try your best not to skip two days. If your habit is to go walking after dinner to help with digestion, don’t kick yourself for missing a day, simply don’t allow those missed days to rack up.
I used to advise not going overboard whenever you’re picking up new habits but to each their own. If you know yourself well enough, and it’s comfortable and repeatable to hit the ground running, more power to you.
If you can simply start reading for an hour on day one, instead of just five minutes, I’d say go for it. Simply scale back or add more if you want.
A culture of fun
It’s no exaggeration to see how hard Japanese people work. I talked to the staff at our hotel and they mentioned a ridiculous 12-16 hour shift per day. If they’re tired, they just sleep in the back during their lunch break. At restaurants, the staff were moving non-stop from before they were open ‘til they closed. But they were always laughing and enjoying their work.
Maybe it was just an exception for the places I’ve seen, but the more fun the staff was allowed to have, the better their services were.
The combination of pride in your work and fun is a lethal combination of excellence. Could we find ways to make things fun for ourselves? Can we do something that we can take pride in? It might take a mental shift to get to each desired state, but it’s something worth striving for.
It’s questions that I’ve been asking myself more and more. If you don’t take pride in your work, you probably won’t push yourself to find ways to get better at it. If you don’t, ask yourself what would you need to do in order to have pride in your work. Is it working a different job or a different industry? In what ways can you have fun while doing your job?
I can confidently say that anytime fun was involved, I learned and retained information much easier, and it made me curious to learn more about any given subject. It’s a reason why in physics class, the most fun part was seeing chemical reactions. This motivated a Google binge in which I learned more about physics than from reading assigned work from our teacher.
You should feel nourished after a good day of work or after a bout of desired action to build good habits. In Japan, after a delicious meal, they say “gochisousama deshita” or “thank you for the meal”, or “It was a feast”. This insinuates a feeling of gratefulness for what we ate and for the acts of service put into the meal.
It’s the same gratefulness and fullness we should feel when we work towards our desired culture or our path towards excellence.
*Check out my last article on thanks for nothing*
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