What it Takes to be Great

Initially written for my blog and available for reading there along with relevant images. Posting here for the warriors who are truly dedicated to self-betterment. Pronoun "we" used instead of "I" because this article was jointly researched and written.

May the Force be with you.

What it Takes to be Great

How does it feel to be great at something, far above average and beyond even good? We do not, in all honestly, know the answer to this question, since we do not consider ourselves great by our own definition. To be great, we believe, is to be among the very best at some endeavour or pursuit by exploring that endeavour or pursuit to the highest and fullest extent humanly possible.

We do, however, know what it takes to one day become great. The list below is the result of years of individual and many months of joint research in the field of self-development driven success, or what we call peak human performance.

1. Self-honesty

What?
This is where every effort or venture begins. Whether your goals are personal, financial, physical, intellectual, self-honesty is the starting point of all endeavours. Just as honesty means to be fair and truthful to others, self-honesty means to be fair and truthful to yourself.

Why?
Self-honesty is essential for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it’s the equivalent of having self-respect. If you are not honest with yourself, you do not respect yourself. If you do not respect yourself, do you really have grounds to complain when others don’t respect you? Second, it aligns your strengths, weaknesses, desires, and values with an appropriate focus area.

For example, if you have the genes of an Olympian and follow instructions well, have average or poor creative and artistic drive, have an innate desire for good health and an appreciation for physical activity and competition, then it makes sense for you to focus on something in the athletic realm. This may seem obvious upon reading, but you will be quite surprised, as we were, at how many of us fail to properly match our personal profiles with an appropriate focus area.

How?
Third, self-honesty is a tool of self-assessment and therefore of self-improvement. An honest and consistent dialogue with yourself (preferably written weekly in a log or journal) regarding your strengths, weaknesses, desires, and values is clearly the first step toward optimizing these four areas. You cannot improve what you cannot face.

2. Self-overcoming

What?
Self-overcoming means to continually assess and improve one’s mind, body, and self-image. Put another way, it means to constantly engage in self-competition with the goal of becoming slightly better today than you were yesterday, slightly better tomorrow than you are today, and so on.

Why?
Perhaps the greatest reason for adopting a mentality of self-overcoming is that it provides endless room for improvement. When you compete with another person or strive for a predetermined end goal, surpassing said person or goal causes loss of focus and purpose. We have seen this time and again in professional sports, most specifically in boxing and mixed martial arts, where a contender rises undefeated through the ranks and seizes the championship (surpasses end goal) only to lose it in the very next contest.

Self-competition is by definition an infinite progression and as such has no end goal to surpass. The bar automatically raises itself each time you overcome your current/present mind, body, or self-image.

How?
In the start at least, pick just one thing each day and strive to do it better than before. For us, this often means applying just one new or additional application each workout, or meditating just a minute longer, or keeping our fitness studio just a bit cleaner and tidier, or reading just one more study to validate our claims, or further optimizing just one ingredient of one meal, or trying to reach and help just one more person than we did yesterday.

Start small. Your momentum will soon build and avalanche into something you cannot currently imagine.

3. Organized Effort

What?
Simply put, organized effort is the systemic, intelligent, and calculated direction of effort to achieve a specific purpose or aim, often resulting from #1 and #2 above.

Why?
Perhaps the following example will demonstrate our point. Student A studies for weeks before an exam, practically memorizes all notes and lectures, and spends upwards of 6 hours each day solving sample questions and re-writing middle-of-term tests at the library. Student B studies for just one week and spends no more than 3.5 hours each day at the library, primarily writing and self-marking exams from previous years and reviewing notes and lectures when needed.

All things equal, we believe that student B will outperform student A by a wide margin. Student B realizes that the exam is 3 hours in length and identical in difficulty to and similar in content to exams from previous years. He knows further that to become better at a certain activity, he must practice that specific activity under conditions and time-frames identical to “the main event.”

How?
Exerting effort for the sake of exerting effort amounts to one thing: temporary self-gratification or otherwise the feeling that you “put in the hours,” which leads ultimately to a false sense of hope. Intelligently organizing your efforts brings you closer to achieving a specific goal, like getting the highest possible grade on an exam or shaving time off your sprint or increasing earnings by a set percent each quarter.

The first step toward organizing your efforts is to clearly define your goals. In other words, what exactly is required of you or what exactly do you hope to accomplish? Then determine the variables at play: time, environmental factors, types of movement, difficulty, location, ambiance, etc. Aim to mimic these variables as closely as possible during practice or preparation. Third, follow up each effort with this question: “did this specific effort actually bring me closer to the goal I have clearly defined?”

4. Self-discipline/Toughness of Character/Persistence

What?
We could not decide on a single word or term to express this quality, nor do we have a definitive definition for it. We are certain, however, that without this quality #1-3 above mean very little, if anything. Toughness of character, according to us, means the ability to endure adversity and to carry on no matter how difficult or brutally demanding the circumstances.

It means to maintain and apply iron-fisted discipline despite ample reason, arising either from personal feelings or hardship, to give up or to complain. It means to persist in the face of failure a hundred times just to enjoy one small success. It means to take initiative and to go above and beyond basic requirements.

It means to finish each workout with honour, grace, and high-quality movements. It means to plan ahead and cook half a week’s worth of meals if need be. It means to wake up as early as required or to stay up as late as required to dominate, not just complete, the task at hand. It means to keep going when every thought in your mind says quit!

Why?
We could bore you with arguments here, but we think the following fact will suffice: no person has EVER accomplished anything great or worthwhile without mastering self-discipline, without pummeling obstacles out of his or her way, without persisting through defeat and difficulty.

This quality, we are certain, will also elevate you more than anything else will in the eyes, minds, and hearts of others. Everyone admires someone who carries on through rain and sunshine, who does and does and does without complaining, who erases the word “excuse” from his or her nature and vocabulary, who finds a way where no way seems possible, who uses pressure as fuel instead of breaking under it, who rises above everything, including himself or himself, to do what needs to be done.

These individuals are what inspirational documentaries are made of. Those who constantly complain and seek sympathy and invent excuses can, in all honesty, carry on doing just that. To this they are absolutely entitled. But we are also then entitled to forget them as one of the countless forgotten, here today and gone tomorrow, without trace and without legacy.

How?
Building self-discipline and toughness of character is a skill like any other. It takes time and, ironically, some discipline to begin with. As far as we know, the only proven method for cultivating this quality is to first create some purpose or culture greater than yourself. Find a set of principles that truly resonate with your personal profile, derived from what you desire and value. Add detail, reason, and history to these principles. Why do they mean so much to you? Give them life and make them something greater than yourself.

In times of doubt and weakness, these pillars will hold you upright and give you reason to stay strong. My company, for instance, orbits about these principles: self-overcoming/peak performance, courage to act, and honest innovation, to name a few. We believe so strongly in these principles that something just doesn’t “feel right” when we ignore or violate them. No matter what we do or think to the contrary, a higher call and a greater voice reminds us to get back on track.

Be More than Yourself

The culture you were born into isn’t truly yours. Nothing can truly be yours until you create it first in your mind and then with your hands or talents, piece by piece, like some majestic work of art. Take the best of every world and every culture, select the values and principles that make your heart move and your hair stand, and then you will have something above culture, something above yourself. You will then have your own path in life.