Excellent Work

Why should anyone do excellent work? Why does doing excellent work matter?

Just as regret, the essence of doing excellent work cannot be fully understood without seeing the implications of doing shabby work, and, in all magnanimity, most of the time, the gravity of regret can only be understood and really felt when the consequence is quite unexpected. On the other hand, excellent work cannot just be done; its bestowal cannot point you to doing great work. It's either from a place of awareness of what not doing great work has caused or, at most, seeing the extent to which great work can travel and the opportunities to which it presents.

While the presentation of opportunities can be an upside of why great work matters, perspective on the immediacy of opportunity's arrival differs when you understand two things. Taste and Time.

I'll take this slowly: These two concepts are as dependent on each other as they are independent. While taste can be subjective, true taste is mainly a function of time. Time tells the beauty, the depth of work, the relevance of a culture, or the level as to which the inherence of man cannot do without and while this is said from the aspect outside work it applies same to work, the articles which you write, the books which you read, the projects which you work on, the flowers which you nurture by your bedside, the moments which you find yourself in the practice of whatever can only be valued as time goes.

This is one reason excellent work ought to be done so that your work stands the test of time, but in several contexts, your taste greatly determines how far your work can go. Everything is an art in the grand scheme of things. It holds your mark. "Hey, who worked on this?" "Hey, who owns this exam script?" "Hey, who clerked this patient?" It holds your mark; it signifies you were there and should show taste, which, sub-contextually, would have to do with how you approach the work of art in its context.

The relevance of taste and time can only be understood and can only be sought when you can acknowledge that whatever piece of art you'll be presented to work with is greater than you and that you are only a servant in the making hence, on any grounds you need to treat your work of art per time as something greater than yourself and this is only how you can integrate taste so that it can stand the test of time and when you treat every piece of art presented to you as something greater than yourself, you begin to see that the immediacy of opportunities which unfolds out of that work of art becomes timeless.

If you write well, take your studies seriously, and speak well when called upon to present at any function, the opportunity might present itself quickly. But in cases where what you do doesn't pay off immediately, what do you do? If only, and only, you treat your piece of art as something greater than you, then time will tell its relevance and its importance, and the opportunities may not only exist for you but for those to come after you do, or for whatever reason you were needed to leave a mark on that piece of art.

Again, they say no one can twist the fabric of reality, and while there might be a connotation to this statement, your excellent work is capable of changing the world. Treating your work as art, knowing it is a greater cause than you are, is the easiest way to cultivate diligence. Urgency is only a stepping stone.