GREATNESS....

 

VIVEKANANDA

 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

 

GOOD TO GREAT

 

MELANIN GREATNESS

 

GREATNESS ....4

GREATNESS ....3

GREATNESS ....2

"Practice & Practice," that is the message of an article from Fortune magazine 

" Secrets of Greatness" 

Greatness and success are two different things. Success requires some luck and timing, no matter how good you are. Greatness is a measure of skill at a particular task.

The article makes some interesting points.

The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It's nice to believe that if you find the field where you're naturally gifted, you'll be great from day one, but it doesn't happen. There's no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice." It's activity that's explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It's the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

A natural question that arise from this is how it applies to business.
Can you be great at work?

The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements - you can practice them all.

Still, they aren't the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information - can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude.

Instead, it's all about how you do what you're already doing - you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it.

The key is to get the right feedback, and to be deliberate in how you approach work, how you make decisions, etc., so that you can learn from each experience. The bad news is that a bad boss might not give you any feedback, or worse, might give you bad feedback.

So how do you develop the discipline to practice?

1. Approach each critical task with an explicit goal of getting much better at it.

2. As you do the task, focus on what's happening and why you're doing it the way you are.

3. After the task, get feedback on your performance from multiple sources. Make changes in your behavior as necessary.

4. Continually build mental models of your situation - your industry, your company, your career. Enlarge the models to encompass more factors.

5. Do those steps regularly, not sporadically. Occasional practice does not work.

GREATNESS ...1

WHEN ALEXANDER THE GREAT CAME TO INDIA,
one sannyasin asked him, "Why are you torturing yourself, running all over the world, wasting your life? What is the purpose?"

Alexander said, "My purpose? My purpose is to conquer the whole world."

The sannyasin said, "Can you just be patient enough to answer my one question? If in a desert you are lost, thirsty and hungry for many days, and I come with a glass of water, how much of your empire will you be ready to give in exchange for a glass of water?"

Nobody had ever asked such a question to Alexander. He said, "How much? If I am dying I can give you half of my empire."

The sannyasin said, "But I am not willing to sell for half an empire; then you will die. I need your full empire, the whole empire, as I am giving you the whole glass of water."

Alexander said, "Perhaps in such a situation, I may be ready to give you the whole empire and take one glass of water."

The sannyasin started laughing. He said, "Then it is better you go home. Don't bother about this empire; its value is not more than one glass of water."

But these people -- Alexander the Great, or others of his category -- are perhaps searching for something else, and are not aware of it. THEY ARE SEARCHING FOR GREATNESS -- but greatness does not come from acquiring an empire. GREATNESS COMES FROM BECOMING YOUR REAL SELF, bringing your potentiality to actualization. It may be a grass flower, it may not be a lotus -- but nature makes no difference.

When the sun rises it does not dance longer on the lotus. It does not ignore a grass flower and say, "Be out of the way, you untouchable, you sudra! I'm here for the lotus flowers, the roses."

When the rain comes it does not make any distinction, any discrimination; when the wind comes it makes no distinction, no discrimination.

The real question is not whether you are a rose, or a lotus flower, or just an unnamed grass flower. The real thing is that the grass flower has come to actualize its potentiality, just as the rose flower has actualized its potentiality, just as the lotus flower has actualized its potentiality. THE REAL THING IS ACTUALIZATION OF THE SEED THAT YOU ARE CARRYING WITHIN YOU; that makes you great, and it is a greatness with a tremendous humbleness, with no ego in it.

If your greatness has something of the ego, that means your greatness is not real actualization. You have fallen into a wrong path... You wanted to be a musician, but you have become an engineer. You may become a very great engineer, but something in you will remain tortured, your self will remain continuously in a misery. Out of that misery is all evil -- you are irritated, you are angry, you are jealous of others; because you are crippled, you cannot dance -- hence your jealousy.

BUT NATURE HAS GIVEN TO YOU ALL SOME UNIQUE POTENTIALITY. That is your good -- to bring it to flowering, to its ultimate growth. And you will be contented, and you will be grateful, and you will be humble -- humble before this vast existence, grateful because it has not sent you empty, it has sent you with some potential to work upon.

- taken from OSHO's book