Excellence is the next five minutes

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Recently I was listening “Tribe of Mentors”, an excellent book by Tim Ferriss, and one of the business influencers he featured was Tom Peters. For those of you who don’t know Tom Peters, he is a management guru who wrote “In Search of Excellence” almost 40 years ago, a book that is still considered one of the best business books of all time. I saw Tom speak in the 90’s – and still remember and use many of the leadership principles he reviewed in that talk. 

In the Tim Ferriss book, Tom Peters highlights that excellence is not a grand aspiration, but rather the way to practice excellence in today’s world is to make the next five minutes excellent. Make the next five minutes of conversation excellent. Make the next five minutes in a meeting excellent. Make the next five talking to your partner excellent. Basically, the next five minutes matters, so make them count.

In practice, the only way to be excellent for the next five minutes is to be fully engaged and also committed to making sure the next five minutes are your best. And, if you are orienting yourself this way, you are giving others, your organization, your partner, your life the best of you. In the end, isn’t that what others, your organization, your partner, and your life need from you? And, isn’t that the way you are going to get the most out of whatever remaining time you have on this planet?

Make the next five minutes excellent.