Our society is full of incentive structures. Being incentivized means that there is some thing, either a reward or punishment, that will influence or help guide our behavior. Some incentives exist to get us to do the right thing, while others exist to prevent us from doing wrong or destructive things. Speeding tickets exist to keep us from speeding; year end bonuses exist to keep us working hard. Economists and psychologists alike have commented at length about the effectiveness of incentive structure in society as a means to change, motivate, and influence behavior. But I can’t help but wonder, are we fooling ourselves?
There is one thing that I feel doesn’t coexist well with social incentive structure, and that is excellence. So many of our society’s incentives, both locally and globally, personally and professionally, are structured around being average and our relative performance to our peers. Excellence is seldom properly rewarded, and therefore seldom pursued.
The marginal effort required to be excellent is high. Often, the cost associated with excellence over the long run either is or becomes so costly that when we live by social incentive, we ultimately arrive at a destination where we become disengaged and distracted from the very things that the incentive systems were intended to drive us towards. Incentives are established to drive us to outperform the next best competitor, they develop a system which redefines excellence as being relative, when in fact excellence is absolute.
Excellence for my purposes and for this discussion is defined as the absolute top level of input in any situation. Giving 100%, putting the best forward, working with your whole mind, body, strength, and spirit, REGARDLESS OF YOUR PEERS.
Here are two examples.
Speeding tickets are a negative incentive to prevent breaking the law, specifically driving above the speed limit. Are they effective? Well, it depends. Is the cost of a speeding ticket high enough that it will keep people from speeding, or are there certain demographics socio-economically that might view the cost of a speeding ticket well worth the benefit of being able to drive above the speed limit? Are there certain situations which would completely negate the incentive system itself? Examples: a wife in labor, late to a job interview, etc. Furthermore, if the ultimate goal (or excellence) is to prevent or eradicate speeding, does the incentive system work? Do we all take up arms to prevent speeding? NO! Rather we revert to the mean, and simply take measures to create balance between risk, reward, incentives, and hence become average…and in reality still speeding in situations where we can find a rationalization for our behavior that outweighs the cost of any potential tickets.
Now lets think about a Super Bowl Championship, a Gold Medal, or any other milestone of Athletic accomplishment. Here the incentive is a positive one, namely some financial reward or social prowess that motivates an individual to make personal sacrifices that are necessary to achieve certain stated objectives, a championship! Does this incentive system provoke excellence? Not necessarily, this system promotes that any individual would do only enough to outperform their next best competitor. Even if temporarily the desire to win some championship title motivates a person to the point of achieving a truly dominant level where no one can even come close to challenging their level of performance (Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps), over time, achievement becomes empty. Ultimately, the cost of being the best becomes too high or infeasible enough that outperformance not excellence is reinforced. With each passing championship, or achievement, any participant simply finds a new goal or benchmark to pursue, and is left with empty accomplishment and a incentive system to reinforce a life devoid of any true substance other than trophies and headlines.
When we succumb to living by incentives we become average, we abandon the definition of our true God-given potential, and we reduce ourselves to the lowest common denominator. As opposed to living lives based on principle and virtue we instead become products of a society and a system known as a meritocracy, where promotion, value, and advancement are awarded to those who outperform…not excellence.
So why be excellent if there does not exist some system that promotes, maintains, and nurtures excellent behavior? There has to be some other motivating factor that drives us to perform at a level that breaks free from our worldly incentive structures. There must be something that drives us not just to go the extra mile, but to go however far we can in an absolute sense…there has to be something that transcends our tendency to measure achievement, and give our absolute best.
Only one thing has the power to lead us to step out of the patterns and infrastructure created by our own notions of “success”, and that factor is a life changed by love. From a theological sense, we are called to give our everything in every way to Christ. It is a sacrifice not motivated by self deprivation, but rather an offering to honor and memorialize a life changed by the work of a loving God. The excellence as defined by Christ is a life lived completely for him. It is not about what we achieve, its about giving all we can, whenever we can, to bring glory to his name. It is as if to say, “Because I am loved in such a way, nothing less than my everything will do. Because I love God, all of my life in every way will be a reflection of that love.” Love motivates beyond incentive, it drives us to disregard the cost of excellent lives and pursue them fully.
Christ-defined excellence creates universal impact. It changes marriages, churches, relationships, workplaces, college campuses, and every nook and cranny of our lives. Pursuit of Christ-defined excellence invades our world in all that we do, and while we will inevitably fall short and come up lacking, excellence is defined not by a perfect record but how we handle respond when faced with our imperfection. Do we revert back to a life of being average and being motivated by incentive? Or do we absolutely and completely yearn to be stripped down in our non-excellent moments, accept grace, and become more excellent through the love of Christ that drives us forward?
I believe that a person who lives by the concept of excellence at all costs, and disregards the marginal concept of simply being more excellent than the rest, invokes change, and inspires excellence in others. While at its best moment this system is intangible and immeasurable by any external benchmark, lives lived in absolute excellence are markedly different and have distinction regardless of achievement. They trigger thoughtful response and dedicated attention to a life marked by something different, some factor that motivates beyond a system of rewards. While many can not define it, they can still see it.
Excellence is risky, and it often means that we must step outside of the boundaries we see and know in the world around us. But in the same breath that excellence redefines “success”, it also redefines “failure”, and when we accept that we are held to a different standard, and that the risk of failing to achieve in an earthly sense is far smaller the risk of failing to live excellently in an eternal sense.
To quote Bill and Ted’s Excellent adventure, “Be Excellent to each other!”
CP
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