Excellence: The Quiet Power of Doing Things Properly
- Caroline Esterson
- Oct 27
- 3 min read
If the word excellence makes your eyes twitch, I get it. It’s one of those corporate bingo words that gets plastered on office walls and then quietly ignored in real life - right next to integrity and innovation.
But the kind of excellence I’m talking about isn’t glossy. It’s gritty. It’s the kind that shows up early, checks the data twice, and takes pride in the tiny details no one else notices.
It’s saying yes before you’re ready, then earning the yes with discipline, curiosity, and care. It’s keeping your standards high even when the world around you is rushing the job.
That’s what Nash Vracas does. Nash is Programme Leader at Aston Martin Lagonda, Chair of the Greenpower Education Trust, and Autocar’s Great Women in Vehicle Development Award winner. But more than that, she’s a walking case study in what quiet excellence really looks like.
This week's podcast features Nash in conversation, and it's a wonderful example of mindset in action.
You can listen here.
The Grit Behind the Gloss
When Nash talks about her career, it’s a real zigzag story - Olympic sport performance, then engineering, then automotive leadership. Each jump looks like a leap. But underneath it all there is the same formula:
discipline + curiosity + compassion.
She says, “Motivation gets you started; discipline gets you there.”And that’s the thing -motivation is mood-dependent. Discipline is identity-dependent.
Research backs her up. In a 2020 study by Duckworth & Gross (the “grit” experts), they found that consistent, disciplined effort predicted long-term success better than intelligence, confidence, or even passion. It’s the quiet consistency that compounds.
Excellence isn’t a one-time effort; it results from hundreds of small, unglamorous decisions - checking the numbers again, managing your energy, asking one more question, fixing the thing no one else spotted.
Excellence vs. Perfection: Know the Difference
Perfection is about you. Excellence is about the work.
Perfectionists obsess over getting it flawless. Excellence-seekers focus on getting it functional, clear, and right for the purpose. In fact, Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Lewis calls this the “deliberate incomplete” - the idea that the pursuit of mastery always leaves room to learn more. Nash embodies that: she treats every project like a prototype - tested, improved, never fully finished.
That mindset doesn’t just protect performance; it protects your sanity.
Because perfectionism burns energy trying to avoid failure. Whereas excellence channels energy into learning faster.
The Elite-Sport Rule: Protect the Energy
One of my favourite things Nash said in our chat was about energy. In elite sport, you don’t let your mood leak onto the track - because performance follows atmosphere. That’s a leadership lesson in a nutshell.
In a 2021 meta-analysis on emotional contagion in teams (Barsade & Knight, Organizational Science), researchers found that even mild negative affect from leaders measurably reduces team accuracy and risk tolerance. So the translation is that if your energy’s off, so is everyone else’s decision-making.
So, protecting the energy isn’t soft stuff. It’s performance hygiene.
The Two Extra Cylinders
Here’s the metaphor we landed on in the podcast: some people are six-cylinder engines running on four and they are still overtaking others. Excellence is those two extra cylinders.
They’re not louder or flashier.
They’re quieter.
Cleaner.
More efficient.
They’re the habits you install.
And when you work like that, something interesting happens, people start trusting you before they fully understand what you do. That’s reputation and it's the power earned the long way.That’s excellence.
How to Build It (Without Burning Out)
Upgrade one deliverable. Take one piece of work and raise the standard by 2mm - add proof, tighten clarity, seek a peer test, then complete.
Pre-mortem your project. Sketch the flow: inputs → constraints → outputs. Circle one likely failure point. Fix it before it hits.
Ask the veteran. Find someone with scar tissue. Ask one precise question: “If you were me, what would you look out for?”
Contain the energy. Have a bad day privately, not publicly. Protect the team’s focus.
Define your line. What’s “good enough” for you? Where’s your excellence edge? Write it down. Let that become your standard.
Excellence Isn’t Loud
It’s built in the quiet.
In the clean code.
The precise spreadsheet.
The extra thought in a client email.
It’s not about being better than someone else; it’s about doing it properly, because that’s who you are. That’s the Nash Vracas kind of excellence. And if you build that kind of reputation, you don’t need to shout; your work does it for you.
Little Move: Upgrade one deliverable this week.Big Career Result: You’ll start to be known as someone who delivers work with weight.
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