I've given some thought to excellence over the past few days.  My work on a two minute video for a Cleveland Tourism contest was interrupted by the nine hour road trip to my nephew's senior concert at Interlochen Center for the Arts.  Sam did a great job, as did the other guitarists, high school students demonstrating the lush reward of preparation. 

Excellence.

Most of my time en route to and from Michigan was accompanied by randomly downloaded TED talks offered by titans of creativity like Ben Dunlap: The story of a passionate life and Louise Fresco on feeding the whole world.  At TED, each speaker distills his/her expertise into 18 pure and often evocative minutes.  One of my favorite 'talks' was wordless, Eric Lewis: Striking chords to rock the jazz world.  Excellent.

By the time I emerged from the Vulcan mind meld with TED on wheels, I knew I'd pass on the Cleveland video project.  Why?  Because I had no heart for excellence-lite.

Here's an analogy.  I once worked in Switzerland with barely a word of German to my name.  On the Swiss farm we spoke with hands, copious head nodding and kind smiles.  We lost a lot in translation.

Three years later, I lived in Germany with an excellent tool to fit the experience:  fluency.  I talked with Germans about slavery, the Holocaust, WW II, Vietnam, religion, food and art.  I dreamed auf Deutsch, got the jokes and made lifelong friends who no longer thought of Americans as vacuous gum-chewing TV addicts.

I plan to be fluent in video production, but right now I'm a newbie.  There's a beautiful innocence about learning a language from the ground up, but I won't be confusing enthusiasm with excellence.  Except for some progress reports on this site, my time is better spent diving deep into video art with purposeful anonymity.

This seems like a wise plan.  Any thoughts?  Excellent!

Photo of Eric Lewis by Ed Newman licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License