Exellence

In class today, we finished reading "A Message to Garcia" by Elbert Hubbard. Although Hubbard's ideas were somewhat extreme, I did agree with some things he explained in his essay. However, I did not agree with some of his ideas either. In his terms, Hubbard defined what it meant to be excellent. According to Hubbard, someone who is excellent has to have a specific set of qualities. For example, an “excellent person” never gets distracted and never complains when assigned to a task. However, I believe that if a person who gets distracted and sometimes complains can still be excellent. We are all human—and we all complain and get distracted sometimes. There is no such thing as the “perfect human” Hubbard wants people to be because we are all imperfect.

However, Hubbard did make a good argument about how an excellent person does his/her work even when the person in charge isn't watching. This applies to students in the classroom. For instance, if the teacher sits down at his/her desk and asks us to quietly work on a paper, students might begin to slack off and start playing games on his/her computer. I think that doing the work even when the teacher isn't watching is something every student can improve on, including me.