Good day! On Monday, it snowed. It was a complete surprise. We woke to 4" of puffy white that fell in just a couple of hours. It tangled traffic, cancelled flights, and messed up plans.

But, it was beautiful!

As I sat here this morning thinking about that surprise and all the plans that it changed, I remembered an email that one of my readers wrote me last year. He had written it during a challenging time for his company and written it to the members of his team. He said:

It is impossible to be perfect. When you try, you set yourself up for failure. Every time you impose perfectionism on yourself or another, you cause yourself undue stress. You are asking an impossible task.

On the other hand you can be excellent every day. Contrary to popular belief, the word excellent does not mean perfect. Excellent means "your best"; it means the best you can do right now, today, in this set of circumstances, with this knowledge and experience. If I give my best and have nothing more to give, I am excellent.

Excellence means that you never stop trying & never stop improving yourself. Each day we grow wiser with new experiences. What we learn today may have helped yesterday or a month ago. Acknowledge your new "experience" and use it to solve tomorrow's problems, hopefully by avoiding it!

~Mark

What does excellence mean to you? When I was writing the book (http://stephenthultquist.com/book.html), I wanted to make sure that it was as good as I could make it. It's not perfect, I know. Sometimes, I was tempted to spend too much time and energy on it to try to make it perfect.

But I know that I did my best every day. And the result is a book that has been enjoyed by many, both those who ski and those who don't.

Bring out your excellence today...

To YOUR success,

Stephen Hultquist

PS It seems more and more people are using Twitter... If you are and would like to follow me, add "shultquist"...