Chris Matheson

The real wisdom here lies in the word "excellent"—not merely kind or polite, but genuinely *good* to one another. Matheson asks us to bring our best selves to even routine encounters, which means resisting the comfortable mediocrity of tolerance or indifference. When a coworker makes a mistake, excellence demands we help them learn rather than simply not berating them; when someone disagrees with us, it means engaging their actual argument instead of dismissing them. That small shift from bare civility to active regard changes everything about how we move through the world.