Introducing Aspirations of Excellence
The new substack newsletter of David C. Wells, Jr.
A quick word of welcome and a brief orientation. I have been writing and blogging for over 10 years at this point, though seriously for the last ~5. The last couple of months have been a flury of activity as my consulting practice, Family Capital Strategy, merged with my new firm Greycourt & Co. Hopefully you have seen an email update from me regarding that transition.
As part of that transition, Fifteen on Friday, my long-running newsletter has come under the Greycourt umbrella. It continues to be published bi-weekly as a curation of hopefully interesting and thought provoking articles about what is going on in the world today.
Greycourt itself has a long and impressive history of developing and writing white papers and books about the intersection of families and wealth. Our Chairman-emeritus, Greg Curtis, has been doing so since the firm’s founding in 1988. It is my honor and pleasure to assist with continuing that tradition in my role at the firm today. And as such, going-forward, my writing focused on families and wealth will be published under the Greycourt ‘masthead’ so to speak.
For everything else, I have decided to launch a new newsletter, the one you are reading here entitled Aspirations of Excellence (AoE). If you are receiving this initial post, it is because you have previously been on one of my email distribution lists for Fifteen on Friday or my prior consulting practice. Please unsubscribe (link at the bottom as always) if this is not of interest - no hard feelings - we all have full inboxes and I do not want to be a nuisance!
But before you go - allow me to share my vision for AoE and where I hope to go with it.
In January of 2021, I published my first book, When Anything is Possible. And while marketing the book by speaking and appearing on podcasts was a ton of fun, I knew I needed a new project, a new question, to sink my teeth into. Increasingly, the question that began to dominate more and more of my thinking was this.
Occasionally, we experience an interaction with a person or company that is truly remarkable - a service experience that is dramatically different from the rest. Yet, these sorts of interactions are rare - why is that the case?
This sparked a multi-year journey to dive into and attempt to answer this question. And what I have found along that journey is a world far more expansive than my original thought that this was largely a question of strategy and execution.
What has emerged are four key ideas:
Being of service to another might be the most distilled definition to the meaning and purpose of life.
We all seek moments of transcendence and beauty - moments where we approach something in its fullest, most complete state (also known as excellence / arete / or in the classical sense, virtue).
We want to both experience these moments (as a recipient) and participate in them ourselves (on our own journey towards excellence)
Finally, this often occurs best when an individual, as part of a group / team, under the stewardship/care of an organization are able to combine their efforts in a unique way
Aspirations of Excellence will be a place to share my learnings along the way looking at these ideas, and what does it mean to pursue and live a life of excellence.
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