Weekly Email: June 22, 2026
We are now in Week 4 of the Summer term. This week I want to tell you about a book I just finished and what real excellence has to do with your studies. I'd also love to hear how your time as an online student is going so far.
In this email:
- Student Tip: Excellence You Don't Have to Earn
- Program News: I'd Love to Hear From You
Student Tip: Excellence You Don't Have to Earn
I just finished Brad Stulberg's new book, The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World. It's a helpful book and much of it lines up with what I write and share with you week after week. Real excellence comes from hard work and the slow, steady road. It doesn't come from hacks, hustle, or shortcuts.
I don't agree with all of it. Stulberg writes from an evolutionary frame and underneath his argument is a kind of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps hope, where becoming yourself is something you earn and excellence starts to look like a personal salvation. There's no real account of our fallenness or of where our worth actually comes from. So I'd read it with a different foundation in mind. We are fallen people, made in the image of God, and our worth is not something we produce or achieve but given to us by God.
With that footing, his definition of excellence is helpful. He defines it this way:
An ongoing process of growth and becoming that imbues life with meaning and vigor. It emerges from involved engagement in something worthwhile that supports your values and goals.
Excellence, he says, is two things at once: mastery and mattering. Mastery is getting better at something worth getting good at. Mattering is the sense that it counts for something beyond you. The education you're earning here at Southern asks both of you at the same time, which is part of why it's so heavy and so worth carrying.
What stuck with me, though, was his list of the things people mistake for excellence. Perfectionism is the big one. I definitely know the feeling and I suspect that you might as well. The paper that's never quite ready to submit, the grades you check on a loop, the fear that one B will undo you. Perfectionism dresses up as high standards but it mostly leaves you anxious and burned out. Excellence is steadier than that. It decides what actually matters, gives that your whole effort, and makes peace with the rest.
Then there's optimization, its own kind of temptation in a world of productivity systems and the promise that AI will do the reading for you. Cut out things on the calendar, automate the busywork, and you're godlen. But you can't automate comprehension and there's no fix for becoming the kind of person your church can lean on when real people are hurting.
Obsession is the last one. From the outside it looks like devotion. On the inside it can't stop. It slowly fuses who you are to what you turn in. Real excellence rests and is okay to stop. It's built for decades of ministry, not for the next deadline.
This is the kind of excellence I hope you strive for in your studies. Don't aim for the perfect transcript, not the most optimized study system you can build, and definitely not white-knuckling your way through until there's nothing left. Aim for the steady, faithful engagement with work that matters, over the long road.
And remember, you're not studying to earn your worth or to finally become someone worth being. That was settled by your Father in heaven before you opened your first book and nothing on your transcript can add to it or take it away.
Stulberg calls excellence your birthright, something you earn. I'd say it the other way around. The work is worth your full effort precisely because it was never the thing holding up your worth.
So give your studies real excellence. Just don't ask them to tell you who you are.
Program News: I'd Love to Hear From You
No specific program news this week but I would love to hear from you about your experience as an online student so far.
One of the reasons that I write this newsletter is to connect with you.
So never shy away from sharing what's working, what's not, and ways that we can improve your experience.
Quick Reference of Upcoming Term Dates:
- Current Week: Summer, Week 4 (June 22-29)
- Fall 1 Term Begins: August 3, 2026
- Fall 2 Term Begins: October 5, 2026
Register for Courses →
Registration for Fall Experiential Modulars is open now
