It occurred to me today that the pursuit of excellence is something in which we should all be engaged.

Yesterday, I wrote about trust and how I hate to be in situations where I have to trust someone that I don’t necessarily have a reason to trust. But today, I am writing about having trusted someone, and that someone’s name is Kevin. Kevin is someone who, before yesterday, I didn’t know from Adam. I just so happened to be in a situation yesterday where I had to trust Kevin. I’m so happy to report that it seems that Kevin is my new favorite person on planet Earth.

The thing about my interaction with Kevin is that he was my second opinion yesterday. I went to someone else first, looking for a first opinion, and this other person –who will remain nameless to protect his identity– gave me information that I had a funny feeling was just wrong, and not “wrong” as in “incorrect”. I thought this person was wrong because he was telling me something that I didn’t want to hear. And, everybody knows what you do when you get an opinion that you don’t like –> you get a second opinion.

And so I sought out Kevin, and I’m glad that I did, and not just because he told me what I wanted to hear. Kevin’s approach to helping me with my problem was completely different that the other guy’s approach. In the end, I think that both approaches would have worked, but Kevin’s approach cost me half of what the other guy was going to charge me.

While I was waiting for Kevin to get back to me about what he was going to charge and how long it was going to take, the thought occurred to me that it was possible that Kevin’s quote would be even more outrageous, but honestly, I wasn’t expecting it. For some reason, I thought that Kevin was going to be able to offer a much better choice for me.

When Kevin told me what he was going to charge me, and the timeline in which he was going to be able to do the work, I told him that he was my new favorite superhero.

* * *

Maybe I’m expressing an opinion that is not as popular as I think it is, but I’m not interested in someone charging me to fix things that aren’t broken. I can’t imagine how happy people would be if they brought me their computers for repair and I charged them a crazy amount of money for fixing a bunch of things that didn’t really need to be fixed in the first place. Maybe it’s just standard practice for some people to do this, though.

Maybe they think of it as “preventative maintenance”. If I ask for someone to come in to my kitchen to replace the stove because it is dying, and they come in and replace the stove, and the microwave, refrigerator, dishwasher, and garbage disposal, as well, and they call it “preventative maintenance” because those pieces were going to die in the future at some point, I’m not sure how happy I would be to pay that bill.

Or maybe, they would have all of the pieces of a related system replaced, just to be sure that a problem within a particular system is fully addressed. If I call my HVAC guy and I say, “The furnace isn’t blowing hot air all the way to the second story”, so he decides to replace the furnace, and all of the ductwork, and all of the cold air exchanges, just to be sure that the entire system could have a clean bill of health, I’d be pretty flabbergasted by that bottom line.

Or maybe, in a hurry, and hoping to avoid too much time spent diagnosing an issue, someone would just think that an particular problem could most certainly be solved by just replacing everything, so it would most likely end up fixing the problem that the problem-solver didn’t actually have the time to pinpoint. If I tell my construction contractor that the floors in my bedroom squeak, so he takes off the entire second story of my house to replace it with an entirely new upper half, just because he doesn’t have time to pinpoint the two squeaky boards in my bedroom, I’m going to be upset with that approach.

Or maybe –and I think that this is a strong possibility– some businesses just treat their customers this way because they’ve gotten away with it so many times that they think that it legitimizes the approach. The customer before me was too dumb to realize that they were being fleeced, and the customer before that one fell for the same thing, as well, so I am the next schmuck in line to get “the royal treatment”. If it weren’t for Kevin, who shows up on the scene to save the day, I would have been the next casualty.

* * *

I guess when I started this post, I was thinking about how happy I was that Kevin was going to be able to help me out. When you need someone to be there for you, when you need someone to be at their best because you need them at their best, then it’s important that there would be someone out there who’s doing their best.

Somewhere along the way though, the post ended up taking a negative bent. If Kevin is the good guy in my story, then certainly this other guy, my first-opinion-guy, must be the bad guy in this story. However, I starting to discover that life is often not as cut-and-dried as that; there seems to be a lot more gray area than I would have originally believed.

Maybe my first-opinion-guy is just operating under a corporate philosophy that is being forced on him by his organization. Maybe he really wants to be doing his best for his customers, but he is constrained by company policy.

I guess, in the end, I just wish that everyone was doing their best. Pursuing excellence. If every individual was pursuing excellence, then companies couldn’t do anything other than to pursue excellence as a company –since their employees wouldn’t allow for any other approach. We should all be doing our best because there is someone out there who needs our best.

Answer the call. Do your very best. Pursue excellence.