Dear PiePie,
I have long thought about greatness, often in the context of sports. The Greatest of All Time (GOAT) debates. How everyone tries to say it’s Michael Jordan or Bill Russell or LeBron James in basketball, and they all have their metrics and what they value. And it’s the same in music or investments as well. Elvis Presley might be a great, and in the future, Taylor Swift will quite possibly be considered one as well. Warren Buffett would be high up the ranking list of GOAT debates for investors, and so too would George Soros and Peter Lynch.
So what makes them great?
Is it excellence? Certainly. They were excellent at what they do. But that’s not enough. Plenty of basketball players have won a title or have been scoring champs. Plenty of singers have had No. 1 hits, sometimes even multiple hits. And plenty of investors have had outstanding years. The main commonality across these greats were the longevity of their excellence.
Greatness is sustained excellence. That one was so good, for so long, that there is nary a doubt that the excellence is by skill and not by chance. And that perhaps they were so good for so long that just pure talent doesn’t cut it anymore, that it also hints at sustained effort and resilience.
Which leads me to, what’s a necessary component of greatness?
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang recently gave spoke at a Stanford summit, and he said “Greatness is not intelligence, it comes from character, and that is informed out of people who have suffered.”
Unfortunately, some level of pain and suffering, to build resilience and character, is a pre-requisite of greatness, especially as we have defined it to be sustained excellence. There is no fluke to greatness, it has to be underpinned by the resilience to grind out the work, day after day, even in the face of adversity.
Most importantly, there is no certainty that, despite such hard work, one will achieve greatness. All this is to say, it will be a lot of hard work and effort, for a very uncertain outcome.
Still, we persevere if we have a shot at being great. For the opportunity to possibly be great is not an opportunity that is bestowed to all, and we should thus honor such possibility with optimism (that it might be us in spite of the odds) and hard work. And wish for a healthy dose of luck.
Love, Dad