Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Faulkner’s advice frames ambition as an inward, self-renewing discipline rather than a competitive sport. “Dream and shoot higher” urges setting aims beyond one’s current, proven capacity—accepting the likelihood of failure as the price of growth. The warning against measuring oneself against “contemporaries or predecessors” rejects status-seeking and literary rivalry as shallow motivators. Instead, the quote proposes a more demanding standard: continual self-surpassing, where the only meaningful benchmark is one’s own previous work. In that sense, excellence becomes a lifelong practice of stretching talent, enlarging imagination, and refusing complacency, regardless of external praise or comparison.