Does God really want me to be excellent?

In college I took a humanities class. The whole semester was focused on one word. Arete. It's a classical Greek work meaning, you guessed it, excellence. Now, I am looking between keystrokes, at a book on my bookshelf called "Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek" by Thorleif Boman. I have gone through this book many different times finding basic differences between how I think, having been influenced by the Greek undercurrent in western society, and how I suspect Jesus and members of the Bible would have thought. Excellence, or arete, being a Greek concept, is something I find myself being suspicious of. Much like the biblical distinction between happiness and blessedness/joy, I suspect there is a biblical counterpart to the idea of excellence. Now, I am not saying God doesn't want us to give Him all we have. But, I have a hunch that giving God our very all (allusions of Matthew 22:37 implied) and being excellence might be two different things. By the world's standards, and I think that is the crux of the matter, excellence in God's eyes and excellence in the world's eyes rarely line up. So, I am going to be explore the basic concepts and do a little compare-and-contrast to see what's what here because I find many Christians have not split hairs here.