Excellence

As my blog's welcome states: "It's not who I am underneath but what I do that defines me." Today, a work colleague had tagged to the end of an e-mail this quote from Aristotle: "Excellence is not an act but a habit." It echoes that line I like so much from the movie Batman Begins.

The full quote follows:

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

This, in turn, is echoed by Ayn Rand's definition of virtue.

The emphasis, then, is on action. To be good one must do good. Pardon the expression, but this perspective cuts through a lot of bullshit. Most people know all too well the types who talk the talk (and talk and talk and talk...) but fail to walk it.

That said, the far more complex issue is this question: what is good?

Contrary to common belief, it's not a question hopelessly lost in a messy mass of subjectivity and/or out-of-context absolutes. Answering that question objectively is possible. Critical to answering it sanely is being cognizant of the fact that before you can answer "what is good?" you must ask yourself "Good? By what standard?"

For details, please see the corpus of the works of Ayn Rand.