In This Article:
- Why do mindset habits shape success and personal growth?
- How does excellence become a way of life rather than a goal?
- Why do small actions matter in building character and leadership?
- How can shifting focus from rewards to excellence lead to long-term success?
- What are practical steps to develop a mindset of excellence?
Is Excellence Really Its Own Reward?
by Matthew Mitchell, author of the book "Ready to Win".
At the most fundamental level, mindsets are the habits we use when thinking about and processing our lives. They are the habits we have ingrained in our brains, and they can help anyone become a person of character and preparation.
To give a super simple example, we all know people with “Chicken Little” personalities where the sky is always falling. Essentially, they have built a habit of mind that interprets almost everything as a sign that things are falling apart.
We could probably identify dozens of other mindsets (good and bad) and name them. I think time is better spent focusing on the ones that work, the mindsets that will give you the foundation to be always ready to win.
Once you understand the right mindsets, you have to actively and consciously CHOOSE those mindsets. People who get fixed in certain unhealthy mindsets miss this incredibly crucial fact: we are not stuck permanently with our mindsets. We can choose our mindsets, and we should choose them with great intention.
I do not deny that how we were raised and other life experiences will have an impact on the habits of our mind, and depending on how you were guided, that can be good or bad, or some mixture of the two. However, that does not mean we cannot change the bad habits of mind, and reinforce the good ones.
One thing I cannot do is make the choice for you. This is often the key missing ingredient in self-development books. They often fail to emphasize that it takes an active choice to say I am going to change my brain habits, and that has to come first.
It is your choice, and no book or seminar or business coach or anyone else can actively choose it for you.
Please do not misunderstand what I am saying. I am not claiming that just by saying you choose a new mindset, the change will be accomplished instantly. It will take consistently using the mindset exercises over time to shift your thinking. It will mean digging a little deeper when you face some adversity and not falling back into the same thought patterns.
But it starts with the choice, and everything can change when you make that choice and then sincerely commit to backing up that choice with daily exercises (which will be shared in Chapter 9).
KEY POINT: Mindsets are habits of mind, and habits are choices you make consistently. Therefore it follows logically that you can choose your mindset, and then reinforce it with action.
Let’s turn now to the first of the foundational mindsets of a prepared leader. A great leader understands that Excellence is Its Own Reward.
There are three key beliefs that those leaders with an “Excellence is Its Own Reward” mindset share:
- 1. They believe that all their actions matter, whether big or small.
- 2. They know that rewards are a byproduct of a life well lived.
- 3. They get great satisfaction from inhabiting a “world of excellence.”
Stick with this for a few more paragraphs, because it is important to grasp the underlying theme here. We will soon tie this back to why this matters for preparation.
All Actions Matter
I am reminded of our local grocery store growing up, Vowell’s Sunflower. After you loaded your groceries into the car, you had the choice of just leaving the cart free-floating there in the parking lot or going back to the store and returning the cart.
My dad always insisted that the cart be walked back to the store. I remember grumbling a little bit about this in my head. What did it matter? I even recall that one of my brothers, Mark, worked at the store, and it was one of his jobs to gather up carts and bring them back. So even the grocery store did not expect you to bring the cart back, because they had hired people to do it!
However, I now see it differently. What my dad was doing was teaching me “the how” of living in a world of excellence. “The how” is all about NOT cutting corners, even when it is a small thing that is easy to excuse as unimportant.
The reasoning was as simple as it was excellent: you use the cart, you return it where you found it, so it is ready for the next person to use. Period.
When I was a young teenager, the leader of our Boy Scout troop, Paul “Big Iron” Thompson, enforced a similar ethic at every campsite we visited. Part of our weekend agenda on every trip was listed as “campsite improvement.” The motto behind this action was to always “leave it better than you found it.”
This might involve picking up sticks or repairing a picnic bench. As kids, we wondered about this rule. Would it not be enough to leave it as good as you found it? And even that seemed kind of strict: We would not trash the place, but would anyone really care if things were slightly worse than we found it when we left?
Eventually though, you look back and you realize that “Big Iron” was teaching us something about inhabiting a world of excellence.
There are many small actions each and every day that put a choice in front of us. If we constantly dismiss little chances to act with character as “small stuff that doesn't really matter,” we are building an unproductive habit of mind.
Rewards are a Byproduct, Not the Main Point
Especially when we are young, there is a tendency to think: if only I had money, status, and power, my life would be good and settled. By this way of thinking, it is the rewards that create a good life.
As understandable as that thinking is, it is exactly backwards. A good life happens when you inhabit a world of excellence first. When you invest in preparation and then execute on your process, you become a person of accomplishment.
That dedication to excellence will generate rewards over time, but those rewards are a byproduct of that excellence, not the point.
The true bottom line is this: If you lead a life of excellence, you will have enough tangible rewards to sustain your life, and you will be happier. If you chase rewards for their own sake, you may not even get them, and you definitely are putting your happiness at risk.
When I first got out of college, my mindset was very much in a “rewards” mindset. I wanted to pursue wealth and status, basically. Many of the people I was regularly hanging out with were off to a great start in their careers. I wanted that, too, and was worried I was falling behind.
My mind at the time was not so much on the process of learning how to sustain success, but rather on quick success that would raise me to great acclaim. You could summarize it by saying I was hoping for sustained success without having to earn it by learning and implementing the right process, habits, and mindsets.
My young self of course would not have put it like that exactly, but my thoughts about how fast and easy success would come were more like an unrealistic dream of a person who had not fully matured. I was ambitious, and the good side of that is I was willing to work very hard. I would sometimes give up my weekends, getting up at 5am to drive for hours to attend an all day coaching clinic.
Ambition had another side, though. I was also focused primarily on my own glory and success, and I would later learn that great leaders need to be focused on how they can help others.
What I did not have yet was the notion that my habits and processes needed to be grounded in the right principles and mindsets.
Please do not misunderstand me. I am not trying to convince you to be a monk and forgo all financial rewards. I do believe in generating tangible results and enjoying external fruits of that. And I value competition and do want you to win.
What I am driving at is that you have to establish the correct order of priority. First focus on excellence, and the long-term winning and rewards will be what happens as a result.
This mindset will also help to remind you that not every action is going to have an exactly equal reward immediately. Anytime my team was going through a bad patch – maybe a couple of losses or more in a row, I would remind them that we needed to keep our eyes on excellence, and the wins would come.
The Satisfaction of Inhabiting a World of Excellence
Sometimes the pace, pressure, and plain hard work of college basketball coaching made me think: “I would love to go on vacation and live on the beach forever. I would sit in my chair, reach into the cooler for refreshment, and just smile knowing it would never end.”
I remember one time when I was feeling like I would love one of those permanent vacations, I heard an interview with Lance Armstrong and he said something along the lines of “there’s only so much beer you can drink.” His meaning being: there is only so much relaxation you can stand, and fun has an expiration date. Eventually relaxation and fun become... well, not relaxing and fun.
I thought at the time, “What in the heck is he talking about? That is idiotic.”
However, in time, I began to understand it. Whatever poor choices Lance Armstrong may have made in other areas, I think he got this exactly right.
If I am on vacation, it is enjoyable to a point. However, if it goes too long, I begin to miss the daily habits that drive excellence.
This is different from being a workaholic. A person addicted to work rarely takes vacations, and can be downright compulsive about needing to work to keep other things at bay.
What I am talking about is beginning to miss fully inhabiting a world of excellence. Once you have created the habit of mind to always drive toward excellence, it becomes your source of happiness and satisfaction.
You eventually get the insight: I am now a changed person and I inhabit a different world now. My satisfaction and happiness come from understanding that Excellence is Its Own Reward.
I do want to acknowledge that no one is perfect at this, obviously including myself. If you do something that falls below the standards of excellence in your behavior toward yourself or others, recognize it, learn from it, and then move on. Keep striving and you will slowly transform. Inhabiting a world of excellence will become an established part of your character.
Preparation and Excellence
Driving toward excellence is like a muscle you are building in your mind. The more you work it out, the stronger that muscle becomes.
You are going to need that muscle to become a master of preparation. Without it, we have a natural human tendency to want to give ourselves a way to escape the hard work of preparation.
We have that escape if we want it, because great preparation does not guarantee a win in any one particular situation. That makes it easier to justify in our own minds giving less than our best effort in preparation. After all, working super hard at preparation might not create the result we want. So maybe let’s hedge our bets and not give it our all.
I am not even saying that we always consciously think this way, but it is a subtle thing that does keep many people from committing to excellence.
However, everything changes if you build your Excellence is Its Own Reward muscle, because then, all the preparation you do is not about winning in any given situation. It is about preparing at your maximum capacity because excellence is just what you do. It is who you are.
Copyright 2025. All Rights Reserved.
Book by this Author:
BOOK: Ready to Win
Ready to Win: How Great Leaders Succeed through Preparation
by Matthew Mitchell.
Everyone wants to win. But are you ready to win? Why do some leaders and organizations win consistently, while others continue to struggle with up and down results or flat mediocrity? If you want sustained success, you need to powerfully position yourself to win in every situation. You may still suffer failure on any single outcome, but extraordinary preparation means you will win a lot more than you lose.
For more info and/or to order this hardcover book, click here. Also available as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Matthew Mitchell is a Wall Street Journal best-selling author, speaker, three-time SEC Coach of the Year, and the winningest head coach in the history of the University of Kentucky women's basketball program. The foundation for his teams’ achievements is the Winning Tools principles: honesty, hard work, and discipline. In his new book, Ready to Win:How Great Leaders Succeed Through Preparation (Winning Tools, November 19, 2024) Mitchell shares proven principles that lead to resilience, preparation, and growth. Learn more at CoachMatthewMitchell.com.
Article Recap:
Success isn’t just about rewards—it’s about building the right mindset habits. The power of excellence lies in daily discipline, self-improvement, and an unwavering commitment to personal growth. By treating every action as meaningful, individuals create a foundation for leadership and achievement. Shifting focus from external rewards to internal excellence leads to long-term success and fulfillment, making excellence a way of life rather than just an outcome.
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