Excellence Essay

"Excellence is in the details. Pay attention to the details and excellence will come." - A phrase I had heard for four years in a row, multiple times a week. At first, I just interpreted it as yet another one of Mr. Przymus's pep-talks to encourage us to practice our drums. Like always, his words went in ear and out the other. That is, until my senior year. It took me almost three years of hearing this phrase to actually appreciate its value and true importance.
I had been a member of the Marshall Drumline since my freshman year of high school. Practices were full of drumming, excessive amounts of talking, noise, pep-talks and motivation. It was almost inevitable that during a long and frustrating practice, Mr. Przymus would belt out through the noise, “Guys, guys, calm down. Don’t forget, ‘Excellence is in the details. Pay attention to the details and excellence will come.’ Excellence doesn’t come over night. We have time!”
My senior year, I arrived at the first practice of the season. I was feeling pretty confident that our practice would be a great one and we would be right on track to another successful season. However, my mind was quickly changed. Having a section of six people, four of which were rookies, was about to give me the challenge of a lifetime. Within the first ten minutes of the practice, it became apparent that this was not excellence. Nor would it be excellent tomorrow. Or the next day. Or even the day after that. In fact, excellence seemed light years away.
I wanted nothing more than to quit and pretend drumline didn’t even exist. But instead, I reevaluated what I as a section leader had to do to make my section excellent. Another motivational speech wouldn’t do it, nor would getting frustrated and yelling at the rookies. Instead, I thought back to what encouraged me to excel at drumming. And sure enough, those words that came from Mr. Przymus’s mouth came to mind right away.
At our next practice, nothing was going right. Our timing was off, we were getting irritable, and the music didn’t sound the way it was supposed to. Knowing just what to say to fix this problem, I took my drum off and told the rest of my section to do the same. I sat them down, and I harped the words that I had heard from Mr. Przymus for four consecutive years. “Guys, we can’t expect to be great now. That’s why we start practicing in May when we don’t even compete until September. We have to take things piece by piece and take it one day at a time. ‘Excellence is in the details. Pay attention to the details and excellence will come.’ We may not sound excellent right now, but we will. All in good time.”
Surely enough, by the end of the season, our drum scores were higher than any of the previous years. We sounded excellent! It went beyond that, though; we learned how to achieve excellence – through hard work, persistency, determination, and maybe a cheesy motivational speech once in awhile.