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NOVEMBER 11, 2021 | The Jewish Home
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Self-Mastery Academy
Dead Ends on the Road to Greatness By Rabbi Shmuel Reichman
I
n our previous article, we continued discussing our underlying question of why don’t people become great. We explained why many never even begin the journey, either because of fear, lack of self-confidence, or a desire to be accepted by others. However, even among those who overcome these obstacles and begin their journey towards greatness, many never reach their destination for the following reasons:
We Began Our Journey, But Never Reached Our Full Potential Some of us do overcome the obstacles that prevent us from starting the journey towards greatness, and we embark on an awe-inspiring journey of personal growth self-development, heading towards our greatness. We begin making progress, heading towards our dreams and becoming the person we know we’re destined to be. But somewhere along the way, many of us fall short and fail to reach our full potential. We might be a leader or a relatively successful and important person, but before we have even touched the surface of what we’re capable of, we become satisfied with the progress we’ve already made and spend the rest of our lives in the comfort of our past achievements. Instead of pushing further, we shift our car into neutral and spend the rest of our lives on cruise. Why do we do this? Why do we cut ourselves short, especially once we’ve already made so much progress on our journey to greatness? There are two main reasons why people often get stuck in this mode.
The first is the “good enough” problem. This is when a person is driven less by a desire to achieve their greatness and more by a need to be seen as great in other people’s eyes. All they want is that when people look at them, they say, “Wow, look at them. Look at all that they’ve achieved. What an amazing person.” Essentially, such a person doesn’t want to achieve greatness. They want to achieve enough so that other people think they are great. For such a person, their underlying motivation is public perception, social acceptance, and honor (kavod). Actually achieving what they are capable of doesn’t matter and is therefore unnecessary. Who they actually are and what they believe holds little importance, either. The only thing that matters is what people think of them. However, this sets up a growth model that is dependent on other people, despite the fact that true
growth is internal. In essence, such a person will always compare themselves to others. Why? Because there’s no need to actually become great. The only important thing is that they are better than those around them, the greatest in the room. If when looking around, they can say, “I’m better than all of these people,” then they feel that they are great. There’s no need to push themselves or achieve their true potential; everything is relative to their surroundings. Why would someone live like this? It’s simple: they believe that if other people love them and if other people think that they’re great, then they’ll also love themselves, they’ll also think that they’re great. They’ve mixed the order up. They’re under the illusion that we mirror other people’s perception of us, but while other people’s view of us can affect us, the only way to gain self-worth and an
empowering self-image is to build it from within. Instead of becoming a mirror, trying to reflect everything outside ourselves, we need to become projectors: We need to build something majestic and beautiful within ourselves and then express that out into the world. When Michael Jordan was being interviewed one time, he asked the interviewers, “How do you think I became who I became? Who do you think I competed against? If I competed against others, I’d never have become who I am; I’d have settled once I was the best. But I competed against myself! The person I knew I was meant to become! I wanted to become better than I was and become the best me. Everyone else made the mistake of competing against ‘me,’ and not against themselves, so they all fell short, and felt like they weren’t great.” On the flip side, this idea not only ensures that we reach our ultimate greatness, but it also eliminates any potential for jealousy. If each of us is completely unique, it makes no sense to compare ourselves to anyone else. As Einstein famously said, “If you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing it’s foolish.” We cannot compare ourselves to someone else because we are all completely different. If we genuinely understood this, we would never be jealous. Once we realize that everything in our life is exactly what we need to fulfill our unique potential, we’ll stop looking around at what other people have and start utilizing what we have. To take it a step further, we can actually begin to be happy for other people’s
