We are what we repeatedly do.
Will Durant
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
The idea here is that excellence isn’t one specific action you take. It’s a way of life. It’s the potential sum of all of the individual habitual actions you take over the course of time.
We aren’t our ideas. We aren’t who we say we are.
We are the aggregate of the things we do.
It’s all too easy to have a completely different conception of yourself than the one that is most evident by your actions. For example, you’ve likely known someone that claimed to hold an ethical perspective on something firmly but then repeatedly acted in a way that seemed to contradict this opinion of theirs.
Coming up with lofty explanations for who we are and why we are the way we are can be incredibly tempting. But at the end of the day, the things that we do over and over again are the things that make us who we are.