Why Few Achieve Greatness ? 

October 2020 

They said he was talented once. Promising, even. A boy with tidy handwriting and the right words in the right places. But somewhere between the goal-setting workshops and quarterly evaluations, something faded. It always does. Perhaps that’s the point.

We live in a world that rewards neatness. There are templates for ambition now, pre-approved routes to success, color-coded and bullet-pointed. The institutions, God bless them, do not seek greatness. They seek obedience dressed as performance. And the young oblige. They attend the seminars, recite the mantras, polish the PowerPoints. No one asks why. No one wants to know. Greatness, after all, is awkward. Difficult to quantify. It refuses to behave.

He had once believed in transformation, believed it might come through discipline, sacrifice, the right mentor. But the rituals began to taste of dust. Reviews, retreats, feedback loops: they weren’t steps forward. They were circles. Comfortable, well-lit circles. And in their glow, excellence suffocated. It died in silence, not with a cry but a shrug.

When the system failed, as it always does, hope arrived. Not as a solution, but as a lullaby. The kind that hums you into forgetting. They told him to keep going, to trust the process, to visualise outcomes. But he no longer wanted outcomes. He wanted the silence back, the unmarked path, the compulsion that needs no witness. The kind of work that leaves no trace but changes everything.

Hope, he discovered, was only fear in a Sunday suit. It spoke in soft tones but never looked him in the eye. It asked for patience, not honesty. The great, he came to see, don’t hope. They move like weather, inevitable, indifferent. They act not from belief but from clarity, which is to say, without needing to believe.

He had worked hard, of course. They all had. But effort, so praised in boardrooms and commencement speeches, had become a currency of desperation. A kind of noise. Most of them weren’t striving toward anything real. They were just trying not to drown. Hard work was the last thing you reached for when you didn’t know what else to do.

But there were moments, rare, barely perceptible, when something different stirred. Not effort. Not hope. But something cleaner. It wasn’t ambition. It wasn’t even desire. It was necessity. The quiet certainty of doing the thing that only you could do. No applause. No strategy. Just the thing, done well, without asking why.

That, he thought, might be greatness. Not the kind they put in biographies, but the kind that slips unnoticed through a back door, leaving the room slightly altered. The world would never notice. The system wouldn’t care. But something real had occurred.

And maybe that was enough.