“But the truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats. I’m inspired by the greats here tonight. I’m as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando, and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there.” - Timothée Chalamet
At some point in my life, I was content with my own mediocrity.
It was a quiet time. Some things went okay, other things didn’t. Nothing ever went so wrong or so right for it to matter. And I was okay with that.
I thought, if every human alive right now will be dead in a hundred years or so, why does anything I do ever matter? Why should I try in anything?. It was really, really easy to think that. It meant that I would not have to try. Not have to work toward anything. And that was easy.
There’s a phenomenon well-studied in psychology, politics, and even computer science. It’s the idea that a mildly negative situation may be worse than a crisis, simply because humans are too lazy to resolve the mildly negative situation. So, it can sit at the back of their consciousness for months, maybe years, only changing when it turns into a crisis.
Eventually, I had my crisis.
It led me to realize that I had just been living day-to-day, imagining a future that would somehow fall into my lap where I would continue to just live day-to-day. Nothing more to life than waking up, eating, working on something I don’t care about, eating, filling my brain with dopamine, eating, sleeping.
So, with nothing else left to do, I changed. I put on a face for my friends and family and worked in the night. I plastered my wall with hundreds of sticky notes when I felt any emotion, as if the wall would hold that feeling until it passed.
Somewhere, somehow, at some time, I started pushing the right buttons. Things started working out. The puzzle pieces began falling into place. I can’t say it was one particular thing that caused it, but rather the slow culmination of my deliberate effort.
Looking back, I can’t say that it was healthy or even productive. But it led me to become me, and maybe that’s enough.
It also left me with some scars and gashes in my brain, holes that need filling.
I want to be one of the greats. The definition, for me, has changed over time, but the want has not. That hole of the desire for greatness in my brain needed filling more than anything else. So, for years, I have worked toward some version of this goal. I have wanted to be great, truly great in my work, in my relationships, in my learning.
But now, after those years, I still feel that I don’t meet the definitions I set for myself.
I feel that I am perpetually stuck on the precipice of greatness.
This feeling bothered me for quite some time. I spent years achieving things that I truly, truly wanted, only for my brain to focus only on my failures.
At some point, I forgot about my original love for the things I wanted to really be great at, and fell into a single-minded obsession with the end goals themselves, with this arbitrary mark of greatness I wanted.
Being happy, truly happy, with my success became an insurmountable task. I did not understand why, so, like an ostrich, I buried my head in the sand at the face of my emotional adversity and continued working.
At first, I did not think about it much. Tried.
But feelings like that don’t stop. They pile up, build up, become a chunk of snow rolling down Everest. They first poke, then they prod, then they crush you.
On the heights of despair, I was forced to confront the core of my self. I was forced to break and shatter it. There was only one realization that saved me.
If I keep chasing some arbitrary definition of great, the goalposts will always move, and the precipice will become my prison. It would be better to make it my home.
The precipice need not be an evil emblem of failure. It can be comfortable, fading into the background of the process of the work itself. When I cross that barrier, eventually, when I do become great as I so desperately wanted to be, I want my realization of the event to only come in retrospect.
If you haven’t already, you, too, will find yourself at the precipice one day.
You will feel that you are so close, and yet you will always come up with another way to be better. To do better. To learn more, to make more. To be more.
On the heights of your despair, I ask that you look not at the climb ahead of you, but rather at how you can no longer see the ground beneath the clouds. I ask that you embrace the climb itself rather than focusing on the peak. I ask that you make the precipice a home you love. I ask that you love it to your core.
That’s all you need. That’s all anybody needs.
If you do all those things, the rest will follow.