The Definition of Greatness

Greatness is something we all yearn for. It is something we dream of in the confines of our mind while asleep as well as daydream about during the day. We all wish to be associated with it and the wise will refuse to live without accomplishing this feat. What separates greatness from failure is the will and ability one has over everyone and everything else. To obtain greatness is to ultimately be the best in what you are doing.

You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over an extended period. The work required is of a particular type that’s demanding and oftentimes grueling. The good news is that your lack of natural ability is irrelevant as in many cases talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things that extend beyond your God given talents–all it takes is determination, a steadfast mind, and willpower.

Warren Buffett, one of the greatest investors of our time, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of investment targets. This is a extremely tedious process and takes a lot of willpower to endure the monotony. Nonetheless, it shows his commitment to the task that extends far beyond what your average pedestrian would be willing to do.

Greatness only comes when you put the time to be a perfectionist. It cannot be quantified by the breadth of your bank account. What counts is what you as a person represent and the road that you took to get to success and ultimately greatness. Practice makes perfect, and if achieving perfection is too great of a time commitment then you should give up all aspirations for greatness.

Trial and error is often times the greatest strategy to the road to greatness. Nothing ever works on the first try, and if someone is not willing to fail a couple times and quickly recover greatness must simply be beyond their destiny.

No substitute for hard work

Nobody is great without hard work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but rarely is that expedited. There’s little to no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.

If something seems to easy or too good to be true then it most likely is. There are no short cuts in life.

Reinforcing that “no-free-lunch” notion is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class. This is a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule. Greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing?

Practice makes perfect

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, and provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

Being content with just being “good” or “OK” will not lead to greatness. You need to be perfect 10 for 10 in anything that you do with no room for error. Of course in the beginning stages there will be a lot of trial and error and looking for the holes that exist, but after recognizing those holes and fixing them will come the perfection you’ve been striving for.

Consistency is crucial

Consistency is extremely important to achieve greatness as well. One needs to not just be perfect at something and stop practicing it by actually practicing it even more and staying consistent with the practice. Kobe Bryant didn’t stop practicing free throws after he hit 10 out of 10. He actually kept on consistently practices until missing wasn’t even a option. That’s greatness.

 

“Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.”

Having Heart

Time and time again we have witnessed great talents not have the heart and determination to be great. There is nothing worse than seeing someone who has so much promise ruin it all because of poor decisions and not having enough heart. One must never give up or give in to pessimistic thoughts, and have the heart and perseverance to get back up when they are down and to keep moving forward regardless of the situation at hand. Without having heart there is no road to greatness. Time and time again people give up because they think its too hard but that is purely a illusion.

Ambition

Believing that you are the best in whatever field you are in is extremely important as well. Knowing that you will get there and then formally believing that you are is a huge step. Only believe that you are the best if you can prove it and through your hard work we are sure you will. Having that ambition to be on the top of the food chain and actually putting the actions into play to do so will allow you to achieve greatness.

Visualize and understand your goals and milestones from A-Z

Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call “mental models of your business” – pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow.

Why?
For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That’s the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn’t be rare and everyone would be doing it. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from.

It comes from deep down inside of you and it is something you are born with. Greatness is already instilled in you, but its your job to bring it out of yourself.

The authors of one study conclude, “We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice.” Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, “Some people are much more motivated than others, and that’s the existential question I cannot answer – why.”

Maybe we can’t expect most people to achieve greatness. It’s just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn’t reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you because deep down inside of you, you are elite.

Elite.