Excellence is aiming to be the very best. It doesn’t mean that you have to be the very best but to be excellent means having a willingness, ability and making sacrifices. Although perfection would be ideal, it’s also somewhat unattainable so we have a saying. Aim for perfection, settle for excellence. In my field there are about 1.2 million attorneys in the U. S. About 75% of those are in private practice which is about 900k. Of those 160,000 are in California. Estimating that 20% of those do estate planning results in 32,000 attorneys in California doing Estate Planning. I figure about 10% of the estate planning attorneys have an advanced degree in taxation which is about 3,200. I have an advanced degree in taxation with over 28 years of practice. That means in California I am in the top 1.5% of attorneys doing estate planning. Across the nation, I would be in the top 2%.
To get to this point, I had to sacrifice. I had to spend hours and hours each day reading and studying. I had to forgo lots of pleasures I would have liked to be able to do and when I started my working career I would spend 14-16 hour days working and learning. Not much time to do much else in those years. The learning never stopped. In my early 40’s after working for firms and being out on my own for about 13 years I stepped up my game to work with some of the most highly and advanced strategies and tactics in the field which I continue to use today.
What are you doing to achieve excellence in what you do?
