Effectiveness is doing the right thing. Efficiency is just doing the right thing. Excellence is doing the right thing at the right time, and doing it well.
Excellence is, in fact, a relationship. There is only One is truly and perfectly excellent. He alone is the sum and definition of what excellence is and does. So the one who is excellence, in His grace, came to you when you were in a state of anything but excellence, and by grace offered you the promise of actually becoming a partaker of His divine nature. He then connects you to purposes and goals way higher, way grander and more glorious than you would every have sought for yourself… Your hope of ever being excellent in His eyes and doing what is excellent in His sight is found in your relationship to Him and in His grace that not only forgives and accepts but radically transforms. And He calls and empowers you to display His excellency and the excellency of His grace. It is only this excellency that has the power to free us from the false excellency of human pride and the mediocrity that results when we are okay with ourselves and our world just the way they are.
Mediocrity by Paul David Tripp taken from Dangerous Calling by Paul David Trip copyright 2012, Crossway Books, a division of Good News Publishers, Wheaton Illinois 60187, www.crosswaybooks.org, p. 142-143.
Excellence is best described as doing the right things right – selecting the most important things to be done and then accomplishing them 100 percent correctly.
