Let’s be honest, most of us are obsessed with chasing success.

We want to win the race, hoist the championship trophy at the end, or sail off into the sunset with the partner of our dreams, the big dream house, and maybe even a million dollars in the bank.

According to WorldCat’s 540 million records, there are currently 2,450,000 books with the word “success” in the title. Clearly, we have an enormous appetite for the s-word.

Most investors are no different. They’re also chasing success — more money, bigger alpha, superior returns.

But “success” — however you decide to measure it — can be misleading, problematic, and worst of all…fleeting.

Excellence, however, is timeless.

WHY IT MATTERS. Early on in my investing career, all I thought about was success. I wanted more money, a higher title, more responsibility, for others to think I was smart, and I wanted returns that outperformed the S&P 500. However, all of these things share a common problem — they are external benchmarks prone to nuance, politics, short-term volatility, bad luck, random chance, and so on.

What I should have been focusing on was being excellent. When people think about success, they think about the end — what they want to eventually get. But there are a multitude of factors that can change the course of an outcome, especially over short periods of time. An excellent investment may not work out for years. Not because it’s a bad investment, but because of thousands of other factors that may be going on that day, week, month, or year due to the economy, the bond market, interest rate changes, presidential campaigns, policy changes, and on and on.

One of my favorite documentaries is The Last Dance, which follows Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls basketball team’s run to win six championships over eight seasons. Many people tend to fixate on the “success” of Jordan and the Bulls from winning all those Championships, but that misses the bigger point hidden in the subtext of that doc. Jordan — and many of the Bulls — were obsessed with being excellent.

Jordan worked harder at perfecting his game than anyone around him. And that pursuit often looked nothing like success. Long hours in the gym during the offseason, hiring a personal trainer to reshape his strength routine, and scrimmages that ran late into the night with all the opponents he would face in the upcoming season. He took notes on every single player after every single practice game.

The championships just so happened to work out due to an enormous number of factors that were completely outside of Jordan’s control. But the one thing he could control was his own skill at his craft.

Here’s why this applies so precisely to investing:

→ Stock Movements Can Be Misleading

The feedback loop for successful investments can be deceptive. People buy stock in bad companies that are destined to go to zero every single day. But many of those decisions are not immediately apparent to the investor. Stock in a bad company can go up for years. Investors chasing “success” can easily convince themselves they are geniuses as the value in those bad companies goes up.

Excellence is buried in all those hours of blood, sweat, and tears you pour into making sound decisions well before you buy.

→ Buying Stocks Has Almost No Limits

Opening a brokerage account requires no formal training, no classes, no prerequisites, and no credentials of any kind. Very few other industries work like this.

Becoming a doctor requires above average high school credentials, four years at a credible college, another four years of medical school, hours and hours of studying, teacher recommendations, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Becoming an NBA basketball player requires an even longer list.

The requirements for you to buy a stock on the open market are little more than an internet connection, five minutes of your time, and a few dollars. This leads many investors to think they can become “successful” without doing an enormous amount of work. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Excellence requires an insane amount of work. Success can randomly fall in anyone’s lap for free.

→ Investing Has No Rules, No Referee, & Sometimes No Reason

Investing is different than almost any other field because when you make an investment — no matter what the stock does afterwards — it is difficult to(if not impossible) to ever fully know why a stock moves in a particular direction, especially over short periods of time. This makes getting your arms around a “successful” investment particularly tricky.

But assessing your level of excellence is not only measurable, but it’s also completely within your control. If excellence is buying and holding the S&P 500 for the next 20 years, you can measure that.

The S&P may move dramatically up, radically down, and tiptoe around, going nowhere for years at a time during a two decade span.

• But how well did you hold?
• Did you sell during big crashes?
• Did you buy more when euphoria struck?

All behaviors (or skills) you can measure, control, and learn to improve over time.

→ Most Investing Goals Have Time Problems

Most investors I know who pick their own stocks have one thing in common — they want more money. And most of the investors I know have amassed large amounts of wealth.

But no one acquired their money quickly. Not one.

If making money from investments is the goal, your “success” may be a number that is years or even decades in the future. This will inevitably mean that for years and years and years, you will not have the number that you want. And even if you’re an excellent investor, that might still feel like failure.

You have to focus on your process, your decision-making skills, and your level of excellence in making investment decisions. This takes time to learn and fully understand, but it’s worth every penny.

→ Being Excellent Guarantees Luck

There are many successful people who have gotten lucky. How many excellent people do you know who are always unlucky?

I can’t think of a single one.

Everyone I know who is excellent has had an enormous amount of luck come their way. Not right away, and not all the time, but being excellent guarantees you will eventually find success.

Getting lucky and thinking you’re brilliant is dangerous, unfulfilling, and a recipe for disaster. It is better (and more fun) to be excellent and occasionally have to deal with trudging through some dark, miserable times.

→ Success Is Fleeting, Excellence Lasts

Why do so many celebrities, musicians, actors, entrepreneurs, business executives, millionaires, billionaires, and the like say that fortune, fame, and all their dreams coming true were so unfulfilling once they got them?

Jim Carrey famously once said:

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”

Will Smith, in his memoir, Will, talked about how achieving his version of the American Dream felt. He said:

“I had climbed the mountain of my own ambition, and I was standing on the peak. I had everything I had ever dreamed of. And I was as miserable as I had ever been in my life. I had finally realized that nothing outside of yourself will ever make you happy.”

But Naval Ravikant put it best:

“The fundamental delusion is that there is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever. Success is the enemy of learning.”

Being excellent requires you to keep pursuing, keep learning, keep climbing…and hopefully keep enjoying.

Success can come and go.

But if you’re excellent, you can keep it with you forever.