A Lesson in Excellence
by Joseph Walker

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the summer that Joe turned pro. For several years, my eldest son had been mowing the grounds at the Walker Estate. But that year our neighbors in the duplex across the street offered to pay Joe to do the same for them. It wasn’t a big job, but it provided enough income to keep him in cologne, styling gel, and a pair of fashionably baggy shorts.

One day, while Joe and I were sacrificing my right elbow to the gods of pull-start lawn mower engines, I noticed that the neighbor’s lawn was littered with little green apples that had fallen from their apple tree.

“Hey, Joe,” I said between pulls, “why don’t you pick up the apples before you mow?”

ldquo;Don’t have to,” he said. “The blade is set high enough that it goes over the top of ‘em.”

“That may be true,” I said. “But don’t you think you should pick them up anyway?”

“No.”

“Yeah, I know—it was a dumb question. Might as well ask another: “Why not?”

“They pay me to mow the lawn,” he said. “They don’t pay me to pick up apples.”

“Well, yes, that’s true,” I said. “They don’t pay you to breathe, either, but you still manage to do that while you mow the lawn, don’t you?” Just in case he didn’t understand what I was saying, I cut to the chase: “Joe, pick up the apples!”

Grudgingly, he did so, but not before he gave me The Look. You know the one: eyes rolled back, a sneer on the lips, resentment written all over the face. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I knew what The Look meant. I practically invented it back in my own professional lawn mowing days. As I recall, I administered it whenever my slave-driving father had the temerity to suggest that it was inappropriate to leave long strips of lawn unmowed.

“These folks are paying you good money,” Dad would say. “You owe them good work.”

That’s how I knew what Joe was thinking when I made him pick up those little green apples. And because I knew, and because I cared about him and the kind of person he was becoming, I wanted to sit down right there and teach him everything life had taught me about the value of work. I wanted him to understand that this one lesson well-learned could very likely mean the difference between success and failure in life.

But I don’t know—somehow that seemed a little too cosmic for a thirteen-year-old with a bad attitude about apples. So I smiled at him and gave his shoulders a squeeze.

“Look,” I said, “I know picking up the apples seems like a lot of extra work. But be honest—it looks better, and it really isn’t that big of a deal to do it, is it?”

He shook his head slowly. The Look melted. A little.

ldquo;But by doing that one simple thing,” I continued, “you’ve turned an adequate job into an excellent one. It’s almost always that way—the main difference between adequate work and excellent work is just a little extra effort. And the way I see it, why settle for adequate when you’re capable of excellence?”

Joe didn’t respond—at least, not immediately. But somehow I think he understood. He started trying a little harder to do the work of which he is capable. And while there were still a few bumps along the way here and there, he became a great and much valued employee at the convenience store, the hardest-working (if not the most talented) basketball player on the high school team and, eventually, a great student who is headed off to law school next year.

And if that isn’t the mark of a pro—lawn mowing or otherwise—then God didn’t make those little green apples.

LDS Living Magazine