Sitting here on the sofa in Dan’s house listening to some chilled out music by Miles Davis, I started reflecting upon my time here in California hanging around the rest of the team. The past six months did fly by really fast and over the course of it our team did accomplish quite a lot.
While playing golf today with Dan at Soney Bea’s Golf Range in Gilroy, I started reflecting on this notion of greatness. Landon was trying to convince Soney’s son Yuki, 22 years old this year, to go play profession. Yuki, at this young age under the tutelage of his dad Soney, has acquired great technique. Landon himself has really superb technique too.
The two of them standing side by side on the golf range provided a very interesting contrast. Landon in his forties, though a really professional golfer, self admitted he was not good enough to become one of the greats. Yuki still years away from his prime has so much potential; potential of becoming a great himself one day.
Over dinner with Dan, I brought up this subject that has been bugging me. All of us came to this world with so much potential in us. With the passing of each day some parts of our potential gets actualized while other parts of our potential gets forever lost. It is hard sometimes not to feel that I as a person has not done enough to actualize my full potential over the past 30 years. It does sometimes leave me wondering, late at night prior to falling asleep, had I fully actualized my potentials over the past years would I not be somewhere else instead of where am I now.
Inevitably our conversations lead to the bringing up of our talk about Jiro, a 80++ year old sushi chef based in Japan that has over the course of his career been presented on three occasions the 3 star Michelin award. Jiro stressed that one should choose one’s path early in life, stick with it and not change course ever.
The way I understood his message was that greatness is in fact a choice. It is definitely within the reach of anyone who aspires to it. It is something achieved through consistant and relentless directing of one’s effort towards a specific endeavor. Greatness and mastery is inevitably achieved after countless years of devoted effort and hard work. If such is the case then mediocrity too is a choice. Mediocrity is the diversion of one’s potential towards a multitude of endeavors for reasons known and unknown, whatever so.
Dan offered his opinion on this – aspirations towards greatness comes at an opportunity cost. Total devotion of one’s time and effort towards a specific endeavor entails the giving up of the multitude of options and opportunities life offers at different points in time. In his personal opinion life becomes meaningless and tasteless if one forgoes the partaking of such options and opportunities during the course of one’s life in the pursuit of one specific endeavor.
Taking one of the preceding statement that “Greatness is a choice” as true, suppose one does choose to become great then what indeed is truly worthy for one to be good at since the opportunity cost of becoming great is indeed so high. Having asked this question, one cannot help but conclude there is no single clear cut answer to this question. What is perceived as aspiration towards greatness by one person can be at the same time perceived as stupidity and a waste of time by another.
This leads us to an interesting point to note, the journey towards becoming great at something entails the need for one to be able to stand alone and away from the herd. When one perceives the herd, one perceives security from being part of a large horde. Such is a false sense of security. What the herds offers is in fact often conflicting and contradictory messages. Acting based upon herd instinct often leads one to walk around in circles, ultimately to mediocrity. Since greatness is perceived, constantly standing apart from the herd ironically leads to the lack of meaning in one’s aspirations, hence a lack of greatness. As quoted from Aristotle, “man is by nature a social animal”.
My personal conclusion after much contemplation, there is no definite right and wrong answer at all. It is neither wrong nor right to enjoy the company of the herd. It is neither wrong nor right to stand apart from the herd. However to pursue greatness and mastery for the sake of greatness and mastery’s sake is crazy. Since there is no definite wrong nor right answer to this question of greatness, passion then should be the main driving forces behind one’s endeavors in life and not the opinion of others. To base one’s endeavors on the opinions of one’s friends and family inevitably leads one to adopt conflicting endeavors and thereby causing one’s unhappiness.