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    Sustainable Excellence: Ten Principles To Leading Your Uncommon And Extraordinary Life
    Sustainable Excellence: Ten Principles To Leading Your Uncommon And Extraordinary Life
    Sustainable Excellence: Ten Principles To Leading Your Uncommon And Extraordinary Life
    Ebook143 pages1 hour

    Sustainable Excellence: Ten Principles To Leading Your Uncommon And Extraordinary Life

    By Terry Tucker

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    About this ebook

    Terry Tucker believes everyone is born to lead an uncommon and extraordinary life and that has nothing to do with where you work, how much  money you make, or where you live. We are not all born with the same gifts and talents but we all have the ability to become the best person we are capable of becoming. But how do you achieve this remarkable life in an age where everyone seems to just get by? In this book, Terry answers the three basic questions that will lead you to your best life. "What is excellence, how do you achieve it, and most importantly, how do you sustain it?"

     

    The ten principles outlined in this book will provide you with the bedrock necessary to form the foundation of unshakeable beliefs and dedicated behaviors that will guide you to your uncommon and extraordinary life These principles will reinforce your attitude, no matter how much pain you must endure or how many obstacles you must overcome to achieve and maintain excellence. Do you have what it takes to apply these principles to lead your uncommon and extraordinary life?

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFive Stones Press
    Release dateOct 20, 2020
    ISBN9781393099208
    Sustainable Excellence: Ten Principles To Leading Your Uncommon And Extraordinary Life
    Author

    Terry Tucker

    Terry Tucker has been an NCAA Division I college basketball player, a Citadel cadet, an undercover narcotics investigator, a SWAT Team Hostage Negotiator, a high school basketball coach, a business owner, and most recently, a cancer warrior. He and his wife have lived all over the United States and currently reside in Colorado with their daughter and a Wheaton Terrier, Maggie. In 2019, Terry started the website, Motivational Check, to help others find and lead their uncommon and extraordinary lives. More information and his podcasts can be found at motivationalcheck.com."

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      Book preview

      Sustainable Excellence - Terry Tucker

      Introduction

      When fabled Green Bay Packers football coach, Vince Lombardi, took over the fledgling team, he said this to his players: Gentleman, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we will catch excellence.

      But what is excellence, and how do we know when we have achieved it? Numerous synonyms describe the ethereal word excellence: outstanding, brilliant, high quality, indispensable, or extremely good. We look at profitable companies with unique cultures, or successful artists who relentlessly slave at their craft, or difference-makers who attempt to positively change the world, as being excellent in their field.

      The Greek philosopher Aristotle defined excellence as a mean between two extremes of excess and defect in regard to a feeling or action as the practically wise person would determine it. According to Aristotle, a mean cannot be calculated and is relative to the individual and circumstances. To Aristotle, excellence was defined by the person and the conditions under which it was viewed. So, excellence, like beauty, tends to be in the eye of the beholder.

      People love lists. When David Letterman was the host of the popular television show Late Night he always had a Top Ten List segment in the show. I’ve heard many reasons why lists are so popular. Things like: Because we are constantly bombarded with information, we become overstimulated, and lists provide us with continuity. Or: A list of topics provides our brains with decisiveness and definitiveness. Or my favorite: Lists provide us with a form of communication that allows us to know exactly what we are getting.

      Every Monday morning, on my website, Motivational Check, I publish the Monday Morning Motivational Message. This message is one of the most popular segments on the site. While many of these messages are short stories that teach a lesson, I get the highest positive feedback when I post a list of something. The topic of the lists doesn’t usually matter; what matters to the readers is that they have an inventory that purports to improve their lives.

      In early 2020, I had a recent college graduate connect with me on LinkedIn. The thing that drew my attention to this young man was a question he asked me. He wanted to know what I thought were the most important lessons he needed to succeed.

      As I considered how I wanted to respond to him, I thought back to my college days at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, and some of the most important lessons I learned about leadership, excellence, and myself.

      I was fortunate to accept a basketball scholarship to attend The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, in 1978. I had received no formal training in leadership up until this point in my life. My parents had modeled what good behavior should look like and set an example of how I should treat others. Still, I didn’t fully understand what leadership or excellence meant until I attended The Citadel.

      As I quickly grabbed a piece of paper and began jotting down lessons I have learned over my sixty years in my roles as husband, father, police officer, hostage negotiator, basketball coach, business owner, and most recently, cancer warrior, the words, the most important lessons this young man wanted to know, stuck in my mind. I didn’t want the list to be the generic, work hard, be polite, help others, etc. I didn’t want to give him a catalog of rules, or canons, or directives. I wanted my responses to be deeper, more profound, and worthy of putting in the time to make them part of who he was and who he wanted to become. I wanted to develop principles that would help this young man become unstoppable at his craft, but I wanted the list to ensure that he could sustain excellence, once it was achieved.

      I sought to provide him with a list of principles rooted in bedrock to form the foundation of unshakable beliefs and dedicated behaviors despite the prodigious and tumultuous circumstances that he might encounter during his life.

      I remember one of the stories that I often tell when I am interviewed on a podcast, or speak to groups. The story is about the scene in the movie Rocky, where Rocky guzzles the five raw eggs.

      Whenever I tell this story, I ask the audience to put themselves in the place of Rocky and apply the scene to defining their brand of excellence.

      As a prelude to the scene, Rocky is a two-bit pugilist who has no hopes of ever making it big in the boxing world. His job is to collect the outstanding debts for the neighborhood loan shark.

      However, out of the blue, Rocky is chosen to fight the heavyweight champion of the world, Apollo Creed. Rocky doesn’t have a manager or a trainer. To prepare for the fight, he develops his unique style of training. This scene is the beginning of Rocky’s battle to get himself in shape for the biggest fight of his life, against the most prominent opponent he will ever face, himself.

      The setting begins with the alarm clock going off at four o’clock in the morning. How many people are willing to get up at 4:00 a.m. to become excellent? Once Rocky turns off the alarm, he turns on the transistor radio, and a Philadelphia radio station is playing in the background. If you listen carefully, the weather report on the radio states that the high temperature will be below freezing. How many people are going to pursue excellence in the cold, frigid winter?

      Rocky then stumbles to the refrigerator and cracks those five raw eggs into a cup and chugs them down. How many people would refuse to hunt excellence if they didn’t have the right food to eat? After breakfast, he puts on his tattered, worn cotton sweatsuit and his black high-top basketball shoes. He puts a towel around his neck and a cap on his head. How many people would refuse to follow the behavior necessary for excellence because they didn’t have the right equipment? Who would wait to pursue their dreams until they had the latest moisture-wicking clothing or the top of the line running shoes or cross-trainers?

      Rocky then heads down the steps from his apartment and out into the cold, crisp morning air and does some basic stretching outside of his building. How many people would find the excuse of not pursuing excellence because they didn’t have their personal trainer or their running buddy available to encourage them along the way?

      And then Rocky begins to jog down the dark empty streets of Philadelphia until he finds himself at the base of the seventy-two steps that lead to the fountain in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But he’s hurting; he has a pain in his side. How many people would have said, I have this twinge in my side? I’m done for today. I don’t like being in pain. I’ll chase excellence when I’m not hurting as much.

      Finally, Rocky struggles to the top of the museum steps, and he is doubled over in agony. He is alone, in the dark and the cold. And Rocky realizes that if he is going to be able to go toe to toe with the heavyweight champion of the world, he will have to do the same training regimen tomorrow, only better.

      How many people would have given up on their pursuit of excellence when they were at their lowest? How many souls would have thrown any potential opportunity to achieve excellence out the window because they were tired, lonely, hungry, or hurting?

      The boxer, Mike Tyson, once said, Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the mouth. During my cancer journey, I came to a point where I was tagged in the mouth, and things seemed extremely bleak. I was at my lowest. I felt as though I was in the grips of total helplessness and hopelessness. This despair bounded into my life in 2017.

      After just completing an almost five-year cycle of the drug Interferon, my melanoma had returned. My oncologist suggested that I start a biological therapy that would do nothing to the cancer but would hopefully cause my immune system to kick in and kill the marauding disease.

      I had just finished my fourth and final round of this biologic therapy, which left me exhausted. A week later, I was diagnosed with pseudogout when my right knee swelled to the size of a cantaloupe. The fluid in my knee contained calcium crystals, acting like miniature knives stabbing the inside of the joint every time I moved. That was followed a few weeks later by a reaction to the biologic medication that gave me a blood clot in my lung and fluid around the sac of my heart. I woke up in the middle of the night with chest pains and difficulty breathing. I thought I was having a heart attack, and my wife rushed me to the emergency room.

      Lying in the emergency room, I remember feeling so depleted mentally and physically that I looked at my wife, with tears running down my cheeks, and begged her to let me die. I just wanted out of my body that seemed to be attacking me continually.

      At that time, I remembered reading an article about the owner of a professional sports team who paid a Navy SEAL to come and live with his family for a month and teach them to use their minds to do more than their bodies ever thought they could.

      Part of this training was the 40% Rule. This rule says that if your mind or body is telling you that you are through and can’t go on, you are only at 40% of your maximum ability, and you still have 60% left in reserve.

      I recall lying in the ER and having doctors, nurses, and technicians performing all types of tests. As horrible as I felt, I remember blocking out everything that was going on around me and telling myself that I had so much more left to give. Even though my body was declaring I was at the end of my rope and just wanted to let go, I forced my mind to inform my body to tie a knot at the end of that rope and simply hang on.

      Realizing I had another 60% left in reserve literally saved my life by forcing my mind and body to draw on those reserves that I still possessed.

      We all have those stockpiles waiting to be used if we ever get to the point we think we

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