Your thoughts?
For me greatness is about mastering my craft. Creating great things. It still comes at a very high cost, because practice is not free, and it takes away time from life, especially family time.
Now, Why? Look at life this way: Humans only care about the experience of life. Experience can be focused on family, money, personal achievements, material things, etc.
What you refer to a `great` experience is not really a `great` experience for another person. So `greatness`, IMHO, refers to the experience you wanna have. My great experience is becoming a master in my craft. That is my image of greatness. To Transcend. I trade time focused on my work, for time doing other things.
Now, there could be a person that has a vision of `greatness` that refers to being the greatest dad ever. That is still greatness. So basically, what I am trying to say is that everyone looks for their version greatness, and that not necessarily matches what you define as greatness.
Sometimes there is a need to refrain from actions that would lead to greatness in one area, in order to devote the effort to greatness in a different area.
Or even just survival other times.
And when you look at it, the price of greatness is usually extremely high. You often need to move away from your family, work long hours, experience pain, experience poverty on the way there, sacrifice experiences with friends due to prior commitments, sacrifice your health, lose your friendships, etc.
And after all of that, you will still likely fail to be great.
With enough patience as a techie drone, I will have everything short of private planes and yachts.
So would I be willing to see my parents for just once a year by moving to Silicon Valley for the sake of private planes and a yacht? Nope.
So you are looking for people who either have minimal high costs to become great or an extreme willingness to sacrifice.
>for the sake of private planes and a yacht?
I think if you had to afford these type of things it would be a lot more prohibitive to achieve world-class performance in most of the non-luxury elements that make up the bulk of greatness outside that particular part of financial world.