It’s just true. Child prodigies aside, most human beings who get excellent at anything have to, at some point, begin the learning process from a place of nothingness. Thomas Edison was told by his childhood teachers that he’d never amount to anything because he was an “incredibly stupid and retractable boy”. Albert Einstein was such an underachiever in school that his parents suspected him of being mentally retarded. And Richard Simmons grew up as an obese child and weighed just under 270 lbs at his high school graduation.

These men chose excellence instead of living into the world’s message that they were doomed to fail. As I finish up my quarter learning about Personal Power in our Year of More program, I too am reminded that excellence is a choice, and its one I’m up against every day. I am up against the choice to excel every time I look at a pile of papers on my desk at work and am tempted to procrastinate getting through them. I am up against it in my relationship with my boyfriend, every time I offer to help him with nitty gritty chores around his house. I am up against it every time I suit up for the gym and find myself pausing a little too long on the couch in the locker room.

So the question I’m learning to ask myself is, why not learn to be great? What’s at risk for me to be an excellent executive assistant, a stellar girlfriend, or a really fit and foxy woman? I’m still working on an answer to this one, but by this point in my learning, I know this much- that every time I have chosen not to be extraordinary, that too is a choice. As Marianne Williamson so eloquently puts it:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”