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As leaders we do our best to teach excellence. We preach excellence. We strive for excellence in everything we do, recognizing that we often fail.

But, what about helping others to be good?

That question was explored brilliantly in a law school graduation speech I was lucky to hear several months ago. A popular law professor at the University of California, Davis, Bill Hing, was chosen by the class to speak on this day of celebration. And he didn't disappoint them. I was so impressed with his speech that I requested a copy of it, which he sent me.

Midway through his talk, Professor Hing said, "All of us hope you do excellent work, but most of all, we wish for you goodness."

Then he went on:

We talk too much about excellence, I think. We forget to talk about being good. The meaning of the word was destroyed for us the first time a teacher or parent told us "Good better best, never let it rest, until the good is better and the better is best." But the word "good" means everything; it means virtue and righteousness and morality and perfect alignment. Aren't these the things we really want to have in our lives?

Over the 30 years that I have been writing letters of recommendation, the best thing I can say about young people is not how excellent they are in a particular skill or subject. It is that they are good, decent people with whom I want to share the world. Goodness as a human being is characterized by many things. A good person is an honest one, not a perfect one. Montaigne speaks of life as an "imperfect garden," and so it is. Remember Massacio's treatment of Eve in her physical shame and Adam in his psychological grief as they were forced to leave the perfect garden? Ever since that departure, we have had to deal with weeds.

If we had only perfect gardens, where would be our excuse, on hot summer afternoons, to listen to baseball games on the radio while weeding. If we had perfection, we would never have to develop the skill of forgiveness, forgiveness of ourselves and of others. If we think we are perfect, we can never admit our mistakes, apologize for them, and be forgiven. In his book 'The Forgiving Self,' Robert Karen talks about the process of forgiveness. 'We aren't saints,' he says, 'and we aren't meant to be.' Forgiveness that comes out of a sense that I should forgive because it's right, or forgiveness that is compliant or automatic is worse than no forgiveness at all . . . What gets overlooked is that forgiveness usually entails an important internal process; and that this process can go on for a long time and needs to be respected.'

It is this kind of process in life that represents the real work of being a human being. Becoming a good person is part of the hard, exciting work of your life, a work that is always in progress.

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Let common sense reign in your pursuit of work. And get a real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Find work that you care about, but if you want to have a happy life, find work that has meaning to someone other than yourself.

And then these:

Those good human beings I want to share the world with are those who notice how they live their lives, those who understand that their great expectations may lead to lost illusions, but that the way we live now and with each other is enriched by the expectations and the losses and all we have learned from them, those who understand that confession and forgiveness are important in life, those who know that the garden will always be imperfect but that is part of its beauty, and those who remember the words of an old children's song to "brighten the corner where you are" and who, as adults, try to do just that.

During the past five decades I would wake up many mornings and head to the newsroom and think that maybe today is the day we will reach perfection. I knew that was daydreaming, a fantasy conjured up in those moments of driving time. I knew it was unattainable in the daily business of covering and presenting the news. But I also knew it was fun to try to visualize what perfection would look like and whether we would recognize it if we saw it.

Then common sense would indeed reign and soon we were emerged in the everyday world of deadlines and resources and quick decisions. And we would settle for the best we could do on that day. The imperfections were, as Professor Hing said so eloquently, part of the beauty of our garden because they made us work harder to be better tomorrow, and the tomorrows yet to come.

Thank you, Professor. And thanks to the writer of the Chicago Tribune editorial in April of this year who wrote about the glory of indecision and concluded by writing, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

And thanks to my pastor who reminded us in a recent sermon about how vital communication is, but only if you also know how to communicate forgiveness, the kind of forgiveness that the professor spoke of in his talk.

As leaders, continue to teach and preach excellence and strive to accomplish it in all endeavors. But don't, please don't, forget the good.