Why Modern Renaissance?

The theme of this blog is modern Renaissance. The Renaissance was a time period following the Dark Ages in which people began to look to the ancients for inspiration in new endeavors. Most relevant to my theme is the concept of a Renaissance Man. This was someone who was an expert in a variety of fields. He was kind of like a Jack of All Trades, but was actually good at everything he did!

What I'm Setting Out
to Achieve

What I want to achieve with this blog is motivation for excellence in a variety of fields. I believe that, with perseverance, one can pursue any goal. As an important side note to this, however, I think it is imperative that we each recognize our strengths, and that there will inevitably be some fields in which we find progress easier than others. For example, athletics is not a strength of mine. I never made the all-star teams in sports growing up. But I still played baseball, basketball, soccer and did running. While I didn't have quantifiable accomplishments in terms of public recognition, I did build relationships and learn how to play these sports; I even used my skills in running to complete a full marathon.

When one sets a goal, it's imperative that the goal is clear. I want to share what precisely I mean by excellence. For some, excellence may seem like an unachievable perfection. But striving for perfection actually hinders us more often than it helps. So I'm not calling for a generation of people who are perfect in every way; I'm calling you to strive for excellence in everything you do. Excellence means giving 100% effort to the task at hand. So if you're listening to a deeply philosophical book, but also checking Facebook, then you're not doing either with excellence. In fact, multi-tasking is often the enemy of excellence. There's more to excellence though: it's not about being better than others, but it is about defeating the status quo. You can't do something excellently if you're just trying to scrape by or do the minimum amount of input. Being excellent in many fields means focusing, being willing to stand out, and putting in the maximum amount of effort required for a task.

How Can You Pursue Excellence?

So today, I encourage you to make a difference by pursuing excellence in whatever is on your to-do list already. Practicing excellence is not something that we have to search out: we can do almost anything excellently. I'll be sharing weekly blog posts to help you on this journey, and I hope you'll share with me in pursuit of a modern Renaissance world, filled with the next generation of modern Renaissance men and women!