Strive for excellence…
Not perfection …
Excellence is being good at a good thing. It means that you strive to be the best you can be and to do the best you can do.
Excellence reflects moral virtue and therefore strives toward what is positive, valuable, and praiseworthy. The pursuit of excellence is ultimately to honor the Lord since we know that we are accountable to God who judges righteously. The Apostle Paul wrote,
Therefore we … have as our ambition … to be pleasing to Him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. (2 Corinthians 5:9–10)
Seek to do good things well to make a positive difference in your own life and in the lives of those about you. Aim for quality, goodness, and victory, then enjoy small successes and triumphs along the way.
Perfection is a flawless state where everything is exactly right. It can also be the action of making something perfect.
Since perfect things are without fault or flaw, perfection is a perfect condition — everything is 100% great. Of course, perfection is hard to find. People often use this word as a compliment for something that just couldn’t be better, as in “That red dress matches your red hair to perfection!” Also, if a musician is getting a song down pat, you could say she’s working on the perfection of the song: she’s learning to play it flawlessly.