No matter what you do in life, doing it well reaps great rewards.

Whether this concept is

applied to your work or your health, your relationships or your personal goals, making a
commitment to personal excellence in whatever you do virtually guarantees a life of
fulfilment, success and passion.
In modern organizations, individual contributors have unprecedented access to large amounts
of information. This gives them great freedom to innovatively deploy their capabilities in
order to serve customers better, and thereby to help the organization deliver more positive
results. Whether in sales, accounting, IT, manufacturing or supply chain, they contribute by
meeting outlined goals in specified time frames through the use of their professional skills.
The performance ideal of individual contributors is to accomplish their work with excellence.
existential challenge for contemporary organizations, therefore, is to kindle performance
effectiveness in conjunction with personal fulfillment as widely across the human system as
possible. Encouraging and facilitating Individual Excellence is the vehicle to do just that.
In order to develop a greater understanding of the phenomenon of individual excellence, it
would be worthwhile to begin with the exploration of the terms involved individual and
excellence.

The Individual
The individual is any unitary organism that is capable of an independent existence. The term
individual derives from the Latin individuum (an indivisible thing), that is a sum of the
roots in (not) and dividuus (divisible). It refers to existence as a single, separate and
indivisible entity and also that which cannot be separated, or is inseparable.
The individual being is essentially a child of the cosmic forces in the universe. The term
universe signifies an orderly arrangement of constituents that are mutually related through
external connections as well as internal relationships. Thus, individual existence is truly
indivisible from the total cosmic manifestation

The five cosmic elements

There are numerous ancient and modern conceptions of the universe that have been employed
to progress from the comprehension of the gross particularity of earthly things to the ethereal
pervasiveness of space and time in the manifest world. The most popular among these is the
traditional framework of the five elements (earth, water, fire, air, space) In traditional
cosmologies, the whole creation may be described as arising out of the five elements.
At the level of earth, reality appears through pieces of matter, perceived by our physical
bodies. At the level of water, reality appears through patterns of energy: observed by us as
living organisms, who share in the patterns of energy that we observe. At the level of fire,
reality appears through meaningful information, interpreted through our conceiving intellects.
At the level of air, reality appears through conditioned character and quality, contrasted and
compared by our intuitive judgments. At the level of ether, reality appears through the
continuity of common existence, discerned and clarified through reflective reason. This is a
comprehensive level of experience, where common principles are ppears through conditioned
character and quality, contrasted and compared by our intuitive judgments.