The Good to Exceptional Gap

Most of us are good people. We pay our bills. We keep our promises, mostly. We don't lie to our spouses or cheat our business partners. When someone wrongs us, we don't retaliate. If you are reading this, you are probably a good and reasonable person. Otherwise, you would not be interested in a piece like this one. By any fair standard, you are fine.

And fine is where most of us stop.

There is a gap between being a good person and being an exceptional one. The good person avoids doing wrong. The exceptional person does the costly good no one required of him, refrains from speaking ill even of adversaries, and forgives even before being asked for forgiveness.

Consider what we do with an injury. The good person declines to seek revenge. He holds his tongue, keeps his distance, and eventually lets it go. Christ goes much further. When Judas arrives in Gethsemane with the soldiers, Jesus calls him friend. When Peter cuts off the ear of the high priest's servant, Jesus stops the violence and heals the man who came to arrest him. Restraint would have been good. He went past restraint and served his enemy.

Consider what we do with criticism. The good person takes it reasonably well. He may defend himself, but calmly. But the exceptional response goes further. Epictetus was once told that someone had been speaking badly of him. His reply: "He must be ignorant of my other faults, otherwise he would not mention that one alone." This is the gracious response of a truly humble and exceptionally confident person.

Consider what we do with someone else's success. The good person doesn't undermine a rival. He offers his congratulations. Nietzsche wrote that shared joy, not shared suffering, makes the true friend. He had a German word for it: Mitfreude. Almost anyone will sit with a friend in grief. It is far harder to be genuinely glad when a friend gets something we have wanted ourselves. Envy slips in quietly and inhibits our ability to share in the celebration with them. The exceptional person is able to express genuine joy. And the person on the other end can almost always tell the difference.

None of these is a failure of goodness. The good response in each case is reasonable. That is what makes the gap so hard to see. So it has to be looked for. After a conversation, a slight, or a piece of someone else's good news, ask a second question. The first is whether I did anything wrong. The second is what an exceptional person would have said or done. The honest answer is usually uncomfortable. And it's where the growth starts.

Christ told a story about this gap. A master entrusts his money to his servants and leaves. One servant buries his share. He doesn't steal it or squander it. When the master returns, he hands back every coin. It could be reasonably argued he did nothing explicitly wrong. He is condemned anyway. Aquinas called his failure pusillanimity: the soul shrinking from the great things it was made for, often disguised as caution or humility.

The parable is uncomfortable because most of us can see at least a part of ourselves in that servant. We have kept something of what we have been given safe and perhaps, haven't done much with it.

The parable reminds us that we are responsible for every dollar in our bank account, every IQ point we have been bestowed with, and every resource that has been gifted to us.

Becoming an exceptional person is exceptionally difficult. It requires us to examine ourselves deeply, put away our pride, and go the extra mile beyond impulses that are already good. That may be why people have a reputation for never really changing. Think how rarely you look at someone you have known for years and think, Wow, they've really changed for the better. Most of us reach good and settle there. The last mile is simply too hard.

But here is the truth. That last difficult mile is where the greatest reward lies. It is where we begin to have the most impact, feel most at peace, and experience the deepest fulfillment. And that fulfillment does not wait at the finish line. Fulfillment comes from continual progress, not from arrival. Epictetus expressed a harsh truth when he warned us that without a commitment to progress "you will live and die as someone quite ordinary."