Complex Numbers

Oh, Great.

Complete the following statement: To achieve greatness, one must...

...avoid complacency.

This is necessary, but not sufficient. There's luck, skill, talent, whatever. The vast, overwhelming majority of people will never achieve greatness. Yes, this in all likelihood means you. Me too, obviously. Ain't I a ray of sunshine? With high levels of ultraviolet?

Fortunately, the benefit is in the striving, not the achieving. Journey, not destination.

This leaves out the question of how exactly one defines greatness. I would argue that the greatest businessman of all time was Steve Jobs. Supporting documentation: He and a couple of friends built a computer out of spare parts in a garage, and he parlayed that into a vast business empire; at the time of his death, Apple was the most valuable company in the world (defined as having the largest market capitalization). And yet, by all accounts, he was a shitty boss, an even worse father, and prone to the kind of cognitive bias that leads people to believe bullshit (hence his death).

Did Steve Jobs "achieve greatness?" By some measures, certainly. By others, no.

Now, I'm no expert, clearly, as evidenced by the fact that I'm not great. But it seems to me that you have to qualify what you mean by it. And I think that, like the ever-elusive "happiness," you can't get there by wanting it. I mean, you can wake up one morning and affirm to yourself: "I shall achieve greatness!" You can do this all you like, and you'll die in obscurity - though maybe you've lived a good, full life; that's irrelevant to the discussion.

Since it's de facto Moon Week, I'll provide another example: Neil Armstrong. He gets credit for being the first dude to put boots on the moon. Solid achievement. Not everyone could have done it. But there were at least two (Aldrin, Collins) and several more astronauts who also could have done it. They all had the same training. They likely all had similar aspirations. There was a vast network of support behind all of them; the "first" honor could have easily gone to another person. It was very nearly a Russian. That would not have diminished the achievement in the slightest, but the story would be different. Point is, that's just the most obvious example: not only must one work smart and hard in one's chosen field, but there's an element of luck, a need for support (even Einstein admitted he built on the achievements of others, or, in his words, stood on the shoulders of giants), and the kind of mindset most of us are just not cut out for.

And then there are those who achieve greatness without hardly trying, those who probably don't deserve it. Thomas Edison comes to mind. Dude cheated.

Everyone I've mentioned so far has been male, but gender is irrelevant to the topic. I could as easily talk about Rosalind Franklin, Hypatia, or Marie Curie. Our culture has a bias; we don't have to internalize it.

As Shakespeare noted: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." (That last bit is especially prescient when one considers Neil Armstrong, who quite literally had it thrust upon him in the form of five giant rocket engines.) Any way you look at it, though, most of us will never be in any of those three Shakespearean categories.