There’s a tragedy in how mindlessly the days pass now.
We get up. We check our phones. We pour our coffee. We trudge off to work, to school, to nowhere. We stay busy but we chase nothing. Not perfection. Not even excellence. We simply drift. Polite (sometimes) and tired and half-present. But somewhere, in the shadows of the world, a dream is being forgotten.
Vince Lombardi said, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”
He meant it, too; not just as some locker-room pep talk, but as a plea to make one’s life have meaning.
And there was once a time when people took that seriously. When striving was not just a value but a way of being. You rose early, not to beat traffic, but to build something. You stayed late, not out of obligation, but out of a restless fire in the gut that wouldn’t let you leave something half-finished. There was a dignity in that. Not a prideful self-importance, but the dignity of knowing you had given the world your best, however humble or unnoticed it may have been.
These days, striving feels risky. It exposes us, makes us feel uncertain. Sometimes we shy away from it out of fear, and sometimes simply out of a quiet, creeping complacency. When we dare to reach high and fall short, there’s always the chance someone will ridicule us, or worse, pay no attention at all.
We’ve come to fear failure more deeply than we yearn for growth. So we hold back. We refine the surface. We polish images and impressions. But we don’t pursue. And in not pursuing, we forfeit the pursuit itself; the effort, the exertion, the unexpected satisfaction of pushing beyond what we thought we were capable of.
There is something holy about the act of striving. Not the anxious pursuit of being the best for its own sake, but the quiet, determined effort to be better than you were yesterday. Better for your children, who are watching even when you think they aren’t. Better for your spouse, your neighbor, your aging parent, your fragile community. Better, not because someone is keeping score, but because something deep inside you whispers that this world is unfinished and you were meant to help shape it.
The person who chases perfection doesn’t need to arrive. They just need to move. To act. To keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the horizon. And in that movement, they’ll catch something finer than the hollow comforts of resignation. They’ll catch excellence, which isn’t about trophies or applause, but about showing up again and again with a full heart and a willingness to sweat for something larger than themselves.
We are not here to coast. We are not here to consume and wither and disappear. We are here to build, to mend, to lift. We are here to press our fingerprints into the clay of the world and leave it, in some small way, more beautiful than we found it.
So let us chase perfection. Let us be foolish enough to believe in it and stubborn enough to run after it. Not because we will reach it, but because the chasing shapes us. And who knows, if enough of us run hard enough, far enough, maybe our children will inherit something better than what we were handed. Maybe they will learn to chase too.
In the end, it is not the catching that matters. It is the chasing. The world is watching. Let us run.
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did.
Cheers friends.