 Writer guest Blogger and stroke Survivor Issac Peterson III So we can finally put last year behind us, and we can now only view it in the rear view mirror. (I say finally not because it was a bad year, but because it just seemed like it would never end.) How’s everybody doing with their New Year’s resolutions? I’m doing great on that score since I don’t really make resolutions. But there is one deal I made with myself: to be excellent; not a resolution, but a promise and a commitment. I use excellent instead of perfect for one reason: perfection is a place that is pretty much impossible to reach. I’ve been called both a perfect gentleman and a perfect idiot, but those are just figures of speech. I do try to be an excellent gentleman when I can: an idiot, not so much. Excellence is attainable; one of the ways to get there, in my mind, is to always try my best–that way I can’t help but get better all the time. If something is worth doing, why not be excellent at it? I don’t always start out being excellent, but I do try hard to get there. There is no shame in not being perfect, and being excellent is something to definitely be proud of. If you don’t achieve a goal you’ve set, it doesn’t mean you’ve failed, it just means you need to keep working on it or that you need to set a more realistic, attainable goal. I know traumatic brain injury (TBI) survivors have plenty of goals–probably the biggest one is to stop having a TBI. That may or may not be realistic since lots of brain injury survivors have the injury for years or decades, and there’s not much that can be done about that. In that way, you are already excellent!  |