Creativity and the Pursuit of Excellence

Life in the ancient Greek tradition is not primarily a quest for pleasure or comfort, but a disciplined pursuit of excellence—because only excellence can deliver the happiness and fulfillment humans naturally want. Aristotle’s framing turns on a practical question: what counts as “excellence” depends on function. A doctor is excellent because healing is what doctors do; a knife is excellent because cutting is what knives do. For humans, the relevant function is not a job title but what makes a person human. Aristotle identifies that unique human capacity as reason, and excellence as the fulfillment of a rational life—reason guiding both thought and action.

Richard Taylor, agreeing with the core idea that excellence tracks the fulfillment of a uniquely human capacity, shifts the emphasis from reason alone to creativity. Creativity, Taylor argues, is what distinguishes humans from other creatures: people can produce genuinely novel, sometimes world-shaping works—scientific theories, major art and literature, and enduring philosophical texts. Even if other animals show rudimentary creativity (like making simple tools), the gap between that and human creative intelligence is described as vast. For Taylor, creativity is not confined to artists or scholars. It can animate dancers, athletes, businesspeople, gardeners, and parents—any activity done with originality rather than rule-following or imitation.

Taylor’s prescription is blunt: create something, do something better, because doing nothing with one’s creative potential is a waste of life. Many people, however, feel blocked—either lacking a passion or believing they are destined to “lapse” into a merely animal existence. The lecture counters that this belief is misguided. Carl Jung is invoked with the idea that if nothing else is available to create, a person can still “create” themselves—shaping character and style from within. The alternative to waiting for external inspiration is to treat one’s own life as a work of art: a long, ongoing project of self-construction that can be pursued even when it won’t attract public attention.

The central obstacle, Taylor says, is not the absence of talent but the default social habit of “willing slavery.” Most people let society choose their lives by tying self-worth to other people’s approval. Mark Twain’s observation about human conformity is used to explain why this happens: as children, self-esteem is trained through parental feedback, and as adults many continue to measure worth through smiles and frowns from family, friends, coworkers, and strangers. That dependence makes fulfillment harder, because it replaces self-generated ideals with externally imposed ones.

Excellence, then, is portrayed as self-authorship. Whether the world applauds or ignores a person’s creations matters less than the internal reward of pride, fulfillment, and self-esteem earned through honest self-appraisal. Taylor offers no universal method—paths to excellence vary by individual gifts—so the task is to look inward, identify what one can excel in, and commit to it. Avoiding that risk is easier, but it leads to the “common path to nothingness,” since excellence is both difficult and rare.