Great work is not about looking for great work somewhere inside of you but about working greatly at all the work in front of you. Greatness is not seeked but created or built.
Many times in my life I have looked for something that was great about me until I discovered that I could actually just become it. This took many years to discover because of how I was taught about greatness. I grew up admiring people that had achieved great things and I believed that to be great meant to do something great.
It was until I started to question the idea of greatness that I came across ideas that blew my mind.
One of the first things I found was that greatness didn’t have to be a public thing. That there were many great people that had done amazing great work that nobody knew about.
This threw me off a little bit because to me greatness was also about numbers. The greater the more legendary the more popular.
When I met people who were practically heroes in their families but were unknown in their villages or towns I was astonished. I started digging deeper into this subject of what makes greatness great.
I was also intrigued by why so many people felt like there was something great deep within them even if on the outside there was nothing to admire.
There are so many people who have achieved in private what the world would consider great. The internet has proven that there are plenty of talented people out there that don’t even know the full extent of their potential.
Then it hit me someday. Greatness was a way of showing up in the world, not an achievement.
I realized that all the people that were deemed great had a way in which they showed up in the world and most of them were not even intending to be great, it just happened.
That the wealthiest self made billionaires were not even trying to be wealthy, they had a way of showing up with an idea the way nobody else had. They were not the smartest nor most creative, but their identity was coupled with their thinking. They were really their thoughts, literally. Their ideas were their truths to the core. People like that are bound to be successful. Investors sometimes invest in the person and how that person sees their ideas more than strategies and good business plans.
I started questioning myself on why I was trying so hard to find my greatness. Why was it not so obvious to me to just show up that way.
And then one day I was listening to an interview and heard a Pastor say “The problem with people is they’re trying to get into a room they’re already in”
That for me was a serious mental shift. I wasn’t sure yet what it meant for me exactly but I knew something big had happened to me.
It was only a few months down the line that I knew exactly why that statement meant so much to me. I was already great and was trying to be great. Everything I had been trying to do well I couldn’t because I was already good. The things I bought to feel worthy didn’t work because I was already worthy. I just didn’t know.
It’s one thing to catch a revelation and quite another to embody and apply it.
One of the big lessons here also was that a big and powerful revelation still needs to be nurtured. No matter how powerful and of Royalty a child is, he or she still needs to be looked after. So nurture your good revelations and ideas.
Your work also has to be protected to a certain extent, even if you leave room for new ideas.
Sometimes you have to work at a thing at a level that is so far away from anything normal that nothing normal can shake it. Work at it with that much intensity that it transcends reality as far as you are concerned. In that way it will take a very good idea to shift your intention. Holding your ground is sometimes the thing that determines so much.