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Here is a word you probably come across on a fairly regular basis: “great.” You will find innumerable references to great companies, great products, great brands and great managers.
I have no objection to greatness per se, but let’s think about the practical uses – and potential negative effects – of this word.
If greatness is a quality we should all seek to emulate (and many books and articles imply just that), just what does “great” mean? Does it mean a level of business success that anyone can achieve? Or does it imply some magical property, not available to mere mortals like you and I?
One of the problems with the word “great” is that it has so many different meanings. Does it mean financial success? Mastery? A superior mind? A genetic predisposition? If people use the word to define an accomplishment, especially if they suggest that you should seek to achieve it yourself, it would help if they were a little more specific. Otherwise you are left to speculate as to their meaning. What is great to you may not be great to someone else. Greatness, like beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder.
I shall define great as this and nothing else: a vague reference to something or someone that the majority of people view as having achieved a very high level of success.
One reason the word is used so often is that it can ramp up the impact of a statement. This is a handy way of bolstering your position without having to be terribly specific about what you mean.
While most of us think of greatness as universally good, everything has side effects, and inspirational references to greatness are no exception.
Talk of greatness can be inspiring, but it also has the very real danger of making those of us who are not currently great feel inadequate, inferior and deflated. Lower self-confidence is not likely to inspire you to do things that will make you great yourself. (Seeking any kind of success, large or small, is inextricably linked to your emotional state. Thus, emotionally charged words, even positive ones like “great,” need to be managed with care.)
I once had the honor of working with two people who qualified as being truly great: Arthur Fiedler and John Williams. Fiedler was the greatest Boston Pops Orchestra conductor ever, and Williams is one of the greatest movie music composers ever (and one of the greatest conductors I ever played for as well).
But when I stood next to those people backstage, they seemed to be exceptionally normal and average. I once sat next to Williams on a three-hour plane flight. I was never so bored in my life. (Of course, perhaps one of the reasons he is great is that he doesn’t waste precious limited energy making idle chitchat. Every time I opened my mouth on that flight, I was probably interrupting him while he was writing the theme to Jurassic Park.)
So let’s look at this a different way. Instead of thinking of greatness as a goal or something to fill us with awe, consider what attributes or actions made some originally obscure and unsuccessful company, product or person great in the first place. When we do that, we see that all these great people and products were once not so great, even today are not perfect and may have been great only in a narrow realm or a limited time.
Suddenly, the concept of greatness becomes less intimidating and more useful.
It is an interesting footnote that the word “great” is indicative of general outside approval, yet people who become great usually do so because they do not care about that approval. (In fact, many of them have run perilously close to total failure.) Thus, greatness is not a goal that can be directly achieved. It is an uncontrollable subset of a higher goal. (And of course, many great people only became great after they were dead, because when they were alive, we were all too aware of the ways they were flawed humans.)
Here is another problem with setting greatness as a sort of benchmark for success: If achievement of greatness is the primary goal, this implies a need to seek approval from a large number of people. That emotional need for outside acceptance may get in the way of moving decisively towards your true goals. Becoming truly great can require doing things that are unpopular at the moment. If you limit yourself to actions that most people will find to be agreeable, you might be well liked, but it’s doubtful you will ever be great.
Another problem with setting up greatness as a standard of success is that no matter how high you go in life, you may never feel like you’ve reached it. The great people I have known, without exception, did not think of themselves as being great. One of the reasons why they became great was their humility and awareness of just how flawed they were. They knew how close they were to screwing up. They were incessantly aware of all the things that they had yet to achieve. They also had a penchant for not caring what other people thought of them.
References to greatness create a collective warm fuzzy feeling, but we should keep it out of the realm of goal-setting, standards and business strategy. This language implies that all great people had broad approval all along or were great from the get-go, when in fact that is often untrue. If Steve Jobs was so great, why did Apple fire him?
Like those lifetime-achievement awards given to major movie stars who have made multiple mega-hit movies but have never won an Oscar, the achievement of greatness is an ephemeral secondary element of achieving your real goals and personal success. It is not something that should be pursued as a primary goal, because doing so guarantees never achieving it.
So the next time you see a book or article extolling a great company or a great leader, see it for what it is: an attempt to impress you with grandiosity. It's an effective marketing tool, but as a guide, reference or standard of measurement, it’s not all that great.
Justin Locke is an author, speaker, and management coach. In a previous life he played bass in the Boston Pops, and his big goal in life is to help people and organizations manage emotional energy more effectively. He is the author of several books, including Real Men Don't Rehearse, Principles of Applied Stupidity, and Getting in Touch with Your Inner Rich Kid, a guide to the emotions of money and wealth. For more on how he might be able to help you, visit his website at www.justinlocke.com.
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