Rugger Burke identifies how regular, everyday people can achieve greatness.
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What is greatness? Is it fame, fortune, influence? We see greatness manifested in all walks of life and can easily create a list of unquestionably great people: Julius Caesar, Martin Luther, William Shakespeare, Marie Curie, Walt Disney. Each represents a very different field of endeavor and place in history, yet all are clearly great in their way. While we may debate their relative importance, collectively, we remember them long after their deaths.
Success is the product of single-minded dedication to individual achievement; greatness requires the pursuit of something more.
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The greatness of these individuals, and of all truly great human beings, lies not so much in their specific accomplishments as in the way they lived. People who enrich their environment have one thing in common: they consciously commit the full measure of their talents to serving a need beyond their personal desires. Whatever the goal, choosing to dedicate their lives to something larger than themselves enlarges the scope of their influence.
What lessons can we learn from these individuals? One is that greatness is inherently idiosyncratic. Greatness also presupposes purity of motivation—rather than seeking fame and fortune, doing something for the sake of doing, because we sense our love flowing through it. Greatness demands consciously choosing to be the greatest you in every domain of your life, regardless of circumstances and without attachment to success. And while the seeds of greatness are already in us, they will not germinate on their own. If we nurture and cultivate them continuously, they will flourish; if we do not, like the living things they are, they will wither and die. To a large degree, greatness simply entails choosing each day to live into our potential instead of living within our perceived limitations.
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Finally, there is an irreducible quantum of boldness in great people. The great ones don’t wait for tomorrow to demonstrate what they are capable of but devote themselves to giving their best today. They choose thriving over surviving.
How are we to distinguish greatness from mere success? Success is the product of single-minded dedication to individual achievement; greatness requires the pursuit of something more. Consider the following people: Alan Rufus, William de Warenne, Stephen Girard, A.T. Stewart, and Stephen Van Rensselaer. What do these relatively obscure men have in common? They are all on various lists of the twenty richest people in recorded history. By almost any financial measure, all five of these plutocrats were successful. Each achieved fame and fortune during his lifetime, but none left a legacy beyond their wealth. Perhaps one might even question whether their very prosperity distracted them from pursuing greatness. Even the most creative spirit is often hampered by success.
Anyone can succeed in one domain simply by ignoring everything else.
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How many promising careers are sidelined by distractions of fame, fortune, or the endless pursuit of victory at any cost?
Besides luck and shrewdness, the success of many fabulously wealthy men and women is attributable to their devotion to a single domain of their life: advancing their own prosperity, often neglecting the other areas of their life. Greatness, on the other hand, requires a holistic approach.
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Anyone can succeed in one domain simply by ignoring everything else. For example, let’s say you are a talented guitarist and want to become a virtuoso. Assume that you decide to focus exclusively on playing your guitar while ignoring everything else in your life. You lock yourself in a room and practice all day, every day, and eventually become extraordinarily proficient, perhaps an actual virtuoso. But just what kind of artist will you be? How will you gain exposure to other playing styles that stimulate creative growth? Will you play soulfully or merely know how to hit the right chord at the right time? Moreover, at what expense? How will you fare if you have failed to develop the social skills needed to play with a band or an orchestra? Will you be able to support yourself as an asocial musician with no comprehension of financial necessity? Or will you end up like so many rock stars of our time, great at music and miserable at life?
Once we understand that greatness is a choice, it is important to learn why we are not paying more attention to the voice of wisdom that shows us the way.
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While greatness is often correlated with success, it doesn’t ensure success. In fact, many who choose to live into their greatness never achieve any degree of financial or professional success. While success and fame require others’ recognition and are often the product of a given era, greatness is self-defined—only you can know if you are being your greatest self. Those who do aspire to greatness, however, leave a legacy for the future.
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The work of Vincent van Gogh illustrates this. Despite devoting his life to painting, he was virtually unacknowledged during his lifetime, and definitely unappreciated. Now heralded as one of the vanguards of expressionism, van Gogh developed a painterly language that enabled artists to express a truth that lay beyond surface appearance. Writing to his brother, Theo, he said, “Real painters do not paint things as they are. . . . They paint them as they themselves feel them to be.”
For van Gogh, financial success or even recognition was less important than expressing his feelings through his art. Although his name will never appear on any list of wealthy people, his works now command incredible prices in the art market. Indeed, beyond a small circle of artists and dealers, few appreciated his genius until his paintings appeared in a series of retrospective exhibits after his death in 1890. A century later, in 1990, his Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold at auction for $82 million, at that time the highest price ever paid for a work of art. Yet during his lifetime, van Gogh sold only one painting, The Red Vineyard, for the princely sum of four hundred francs. Whatever the prices of his paintings, the value of van Gogh’s work is measurable by its influence on artists across many disciplines, including architecture, literature, theatre, dance, film, and music. One wonders how many creative people are stifled by the mores and tastes of the era they’re born in.
Once we understand that greatness is a choice, it is important to learn why we are not paying more attention to the voice of wisdom that shows us the way. Maybe always making the right choices seems too hard. Or maybe we hold back and ignore our better nature because failure is a distinct possibility. Fear of failure can cause even the stoutest heart to hesitate. It is easier and safer to console ourselves with the thought that we “could have been great” if only we had given our best. Regardless, the more we realize what we’re capable of, the harder it is to ignore our voice of wisdom.
Our task then is to discover what makes us feel alive and awaken to the visceral realization that life is all too short. If we can do this and not turn away, we trade the chance of success for the choice to be great.
Check out Rugger Burke’s TEDxBocconiU presentation.
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Excerpted from Chapter 5: The Power of 10, A Practice For Engaging Your Voice of Wisdom
Photo: Getty
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I don’t want to be remembered. I want to be instantly forgotten. Humans are evil scum and if you are adored by humans it’s because you are a demonic sadist, an arrogant scumbag. I am eager to leave this cesspool existence behind. I hope that I never come back as a human as humans deserve extinction. Putin is the typical scumbag human elitist, a cult of personality who makes millions by sex trafficking American children but Putin is adored by more people in America than he is even in Russia precisely because Putin kidnaps and sells the flesh of American… Read more »