Arguably Steve Jobs changed the world, did amazing things, was ‘great’.
He wasn’t great as a boss though or as a father, certainly early on, or as a partner or as a person who made his computers in China.
Tiger Woods is one of the greatest golfers ever to walk the face of the earth (in his prime) he wasn’t great as a husband though and he didn’t seem great the times he sat in Las Vegas smoking cigars at the bar shouting obscenities to women who walked past.
Lance Armstrong was one of the greatest exponents of professional cycling and one of the most successful Tour de France cyclists of all time. He wasn’t great though when he bullied, cajoled, cheated, lied and did anything that was required to achieve ‘greatness’.
Donald Trump has achieved enormous financial success but his outspoken attitudes, particularly towards women and immigrants, leaves many other people cold and terrified.
It seems to me that greatness is a label or a badge that society is able to bestow upon people across a wide spectrum but many of the things that make the greatest difference to society are never labeled as great. The person who gave up his chance to be a professional golfer to concentrate on raising his children and being a good husband. The person who sacrificed the chance of big promotions to head towards the top of the company to help look after aging parents. The individuals who cap their salaries voluntarily to allow them to spend more time in the voluntary sector, whatever sphere that is, helping people less advantaged than them.
Those are the hallmarks of greatness for people who actually engage in the social contract and try to tip the needle in the right direction.
To achieve good things or great things always comes with a high price, always with a degree of sacrifice and that is magnified by the fact that we live in a world where opportunities seem endless, where information is boundless, where the chance to review our progress against others is instantaneous and often crushingly disappointing.
My work does not involve heavy labour. It doesn’t involve lifting, physical exertion, hammered hands or injuries and I don’t have to lift bricks up a ladder to build a skyscraper. My work comes with another type of damage – an emotional damage – that Seth Godin beautifully coined ‘emotional labour’. It’s the emotional labour that exhausts me and restricts me in my pursuit of doing good or even great (but only in my world and my eyes)
So as you write a blog every single day (2 years from now will be the 2000th) you engage in discussion of a stream of consciousness and when it’s good it’s good and upbeat and when it’s bad it’s low and downbeat.
This morning I climbed off my bike in the shed after six minutes for the second time in twelve hours, unable to do that thing that for me, less than eleven weeks away from the big event that I want to do on my bike. That is irrelevant to everybody apart from me and perhaps my friend David (whose training I’m watching go through the roof as his miles run away and mine stall) but for me alone the pursuit of greatness is to be able to strike a balance between the difference I make at work to my patients and my team, the difference I make at home to my children and my wife and the difference I make to me.
In this week of hardest weeks that we saw coming for ages that was scheduled in a really difficult way it’s impossible for me to kick start the thing for me that I want to kick start and it makes me fed up. I have to return back to my quotes and my mantras and my philosophical reflections and my sources of motivation and remember that my quest was not to be great like Jobs or Armstrong or any of those others where I focus one aspect of my life at the expense of all others. My quest was to attempt to be good across the board.
For some that seems to be a settling for mediocrity but for me it is the hardest job at all. Inevitably at times like this I protect the work and the family and I lose myself and in turn that affects the work and the family. I end up asking myself questions about how old I am and whether the time has come for me to retire from doing crazy things on the bike (the knee already retired me from the running) and whether I should stop hurting myself when I train.
The only therapy I have is to write to myself in a blog and to publish it for other people to see because for some reason that’s cathartic and for some reason it’s therapeutic. For some reason it helps.
Please don’t see this as a cry for help, it isn’t that and I don’t need people to contact me and be worried about me because there is nothing to worry about. In the end, the only answer can be to put one foot in front of the other again.
One of my great heroes is David Miller, the Scottish cyclist who was caught cheating but I think redeemed himself and recovered, who wrote two books about being a cyclist and at the end of the second book when he competed for the last time as professional cyclist he tweeted ‘Today, for the first time, i’m not going to hurt myself in a time trial’
And so perhaps for me for the next little while i’m going to stop hurting myself. Already my thoughts have changed from the start of writing this blog to the end and it’s never, ever the time to stop.
Blog Post Number - 1256
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