Then they add effort and repetition to create a snowball effect.
“Great people make personal choices to do uncomfortable things.
They work hard at tasks that are required to achieve their goals (even if they don’t feel like it.)
And then they leverage the discipline they’ve developed to repeat the process with another growth inducing task.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
Average & Great.
Common & Uncommon.
Undifferentiated & Differentiated.
Are there massive gaps in the above?
When you look at it from a micro perspective, comparing the 99+% of ‘regular people’ to the dramatically less than 1% of genetically superior athletic phenoms that walk the earth, it’s easy to say there are massive gaps between Jimmy on the JV Basketball Team and LeBron James.
But let’s take a look at it from a macro perspective. Let’s take the, again, incomprehensibly less than 1% out of the equation and focus on the 99.999+% of ‘regular’ people. I’m for certain I am talking about myself and very likely talking about you as well.
Is the difference between good & great and common & uncommon all that large?
I don’t think so.
Sure, I understand the game (of life) is played on an unlevel playing field, some were born further along the basepath than others, and luck can play a part in even getting the chance to round 3rd base and run home.
But I truly believe the gap between average & great really isn’t as large and daunting as common people believe it to be.
And I understand the interpretations between defining average and great are subjective with the only real tangible metric in our society being income levels, which again are a metric, but not by any means the be all end all when it comes to defining personal greatness in my opinion.
The world judges us by our net worth and until they start understanding that real wealth is not defined by how much we have, but in how much we give, I’ll never let income levels define greatness.
In all honesty, I believe personal greatness to be really, really simple.
To sum it up briefly:
Great people make personal choices to do uncomfortable, inconvenient things. They work intelligently hard at the tasks that are congruent with their goals (even if they don’t feel like it.) And then they leverage the discipline they’ve developed to repeat the process with another growth inducing task.
I’m not guaranteeing the above will make you “elite”, but I can say for certain, in a world full of average people, simply doing the above will make you infinitely more valuable to the world.
