The word excellence has become the educational word du jour of late. That’s a good thing. Not only does it replace the unwieldy optics and the clunky turnkey, but it also puts an enormously important concept at the foreground of people’s thinking.

To borrow from Potter Stewart, I can’t define excellence, but I know it when I see it. When I watch baseball and see Chris Sale pitch, or shudder when I watch LeBron James taking over a basketball game against my Celtics, I know I am witnessing excellence. But there are so many other places to observe excellence. A beautifully manicured lawn. Perfectly hemmed pants. Spellbinding storytelling. Brilliantly prepared food. It’s not everywhere (if it were, excellence would no longer be special), but it’s out there, and we are fortunate to be able to appreciate it.

We see it in classrooms during the school year. You know a special classroom when you set foot in it. There’s an aura, an energy, a palpable sense of purpose and joy in the learning. That excellence is certainly special and we need to help make it as close to universal as we can. The two things that contribute to educational excellence are, simply enough, people and stuff. I firmly believe that the former trumps the latter in creating and sustaining excellence.

Anyone involved in education, and this applies to all fields, really, can, to borrow from Gandhi, be the excellence you want to see in the world. There’s no easy-to-repeat set of guidelines to ensure excellence, but we can borrow/steal from outstanding educators. Here are five helpful pointers I’ve observed:

1. Nurture curiosity and creative thinking  (“I like what you’re saying, but what about […]?”)
2. Confront mediocrity and challenge everyone to achieve their highest personal level of success (“This is a workable starting point; now, how do we make this better?”)
3. Use people’s names and connect them, particularly with inclusive language (“Rich makes a great point here, but it looks like Alicia wants to make an argument about it.”)
4. Demonstrate an awareness of each individual’s personal universe (“How are things going with […]?”)
5. Radiate joy for the material and how you’re engaging in it together, particularly if there is an opportunity for people to exercise some level of choice (“Listen to this sentence from Marquez and let’s see if we can explain its brilliance.”)

We can celebrate excellence, articulate an appreciation for it, and demand it of ourselves and others. Just as one of my friends once challenged me to make my day memorable (much harder than it sounds), we can challenge one another to demonstrate excellence in at least one facet of life today. Maybe it involves preparing the world’s greatest cup of coffee. Or modeling near-perfect distraction-free, merge-friendly, swearing-averse driving. Or inspiring a peer to greater levels of accomplishment. No matter, we can follow the sage words of Bill and Ted, “Be excellent to each other,” and expect greater outcomes.