Is It Okay to Be Great? - February 21, 2024

Is it okay to be great? We'll talk greatness traps. And disarming them. We'll talk what it means to be great.

And what it means to be the greatest. All this and a great deal more after the break. Welcome back, all you beautiful people.

We're talking, is it okay to be great? As always, I'm Nick. That's Erick. We're the Get Good Guys.

And this is the Get Good Guide. My friends, we're asking a question on this episode of Get Good Guide. Is it okay to be great? Sure.

Yeah, why not? Why not? It's fine. It's fine. It's fine.

Seems fine. You've heard us talk about it. You've heard us even refer to some real negatives, greatness traps.

And we, on occasion, will point a finger at the greatness preachers and suggest that they are causing some problems for you. Yeah, and we kind of talked briefly, you and I, while prepping for this episode a little bit, about there's a common phrase, good is the enemy of great. Right.

But we're here to say that it's the opposite. Yeah, quite. Great is the enemy of good.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, good is the enemy of great is a phrase that people, the implication being if you don't aim for greatness, you can never get there. But conversely, if you do aim for greatness, very often you don't get anywhere.

Yeah, it's very, very, we talked a little bit of life hacking, I guess we can kind of touch on that. But super unlikely, nigh impossible to skip good and go to great. Right.

So that's really quite difficult for good to be the enemy of great in that sense. We have to pass through if you want to make it to that greatness world realm. Yeah, well, and you have heard and you will hear us talk about, why do we avoid this? And we talk a lot about downsides.

We'll be talking about them in this episode. We will also be talking about how do you mitigate some of those downsides? How do you deal with that? But before we jump into that, it's important to recognize that if you're looking at the entire population, and you're asking yourself, am I great? Am I in that top one or 2%? If you do something professionally, chances are, you're great at that. Just by the merit of repetition, and it's a lot easier to get those reps when someone pays you to do them.

Yeah, it's the truth. And people, I would say people tend to lean towards things they feel inclined for and then travel those paths, as it were, or things they're interested in that ends up becoming a profession often. Yeah, yeah.

And it's not, strictly speaking, limited to that. No, no. But even if you look within a population, so we looked at the whole population to say, okay, yeah, if you're getting paid to do something, chances are, you're pretty great at it.

But even if you were to look at, okay, a much smaller population and say, what about all the people doing that thing professionally? Well, then that's a much different conversation. It's a very different comparison. Well, in the guide, we often talk about good as being compared to the population, not the subset of woodworkers, for instance.

If you're comparing yourself to only woodworkers, it's going to be a lot harder to reach that good percentile marker than if you're comparing yourself to the population. Right. And that is where we start talking about these real greatness traps that when you look at the population of people within that skill.

Right. And that's where you get a lot of these downsides, a lot of the greatness trap downsides. Now, we mentioned already the very first and probably most important greatness trap, which is the failure to begin.

Right. This one, I think, is tricky. It's very easy to want to be good and great at things.

Sure. Nobody wants to be bad at things they're excited about, things they're interested in. But if all you see are people who are great at that thing, right, especially great in, if we talk like a short form media sense, when you're seeing a small clip of someone who is at the pinnacle of this profession or skill or whatever.

And of course, that's what you're going to see, because that's what gets seen. It can feel very daunting to feel like, well, there's no way I'm going to make it to that. Why even bother? Why start? Which is one of the big things that the guide is going to help overcome, is not getting stuck in looking there.

Yeah. Quit looking at that, right? Don't look into the sun. Yeah.

And don't worry about that second summit. Just say, okay, hey, if I wanted to be good at this, what would that look like? Yeah. And so that's definitely the easiest way to mitigate is to deploy the guide or the mindset of the guide, the get good mindset.

You know, deploying a guide is, I think we talked about this in a previous episode, but this idea of you don't have to hold it all in your head. That's what the guide's there for. It kind of keeps it for you.

And then, of course, intention is a great way to mitigate that problem to sort of say, my intention is not to beat my head against a wall here, trying to be in the top 1%. My intention is simply to gain this skill. And the knock-on effect of that is that, yeah, you'll probably be better than 80% of the people doing it.

Yeah. One of the reasons we started the guide is because we both have found greatness in some areas and even great test in some areas. Or hadn't found good ways to mitigate those downsides of feeling empty or whatever those negative feelings of great might be.

So I think it's also worth noting that if you're in that great realm already and maybe you used to enjoy doing your skill or something, it's also worth deploying some of these mitigating tactics and see if you can maybe retrieve some of that joy. Yeah, it works retroactively. And we do kind of living proof of that to some degree.

And that, you've touched on two points there, right? Or two additional greatness traps, right? The emptiness that one feels upon achieving greatness because you are sort of promised or maybe you promise yourself that this will be the final fulfillment. If I can just get to that great pinnacle, I'll be fulfilled. Not so much because it turns out that's not what's doing it.

And so there is that. And then when you are mired in the greatness trap, when you're in the valley of despair, this loss of joy. You're still close enough to the point when you were good and you felt joyful and excited and enthused and now you are mired in this greatness trap in this valley of despair.

And so how do you mitigate? Let's talk about the valley of despair and the loss of joy. We have a number of tools in the guide that help you keep joy throughout your practices and then focus on the joyful practice rather than going into the valley of despair. But let's talk retroactively if you're in that valley.

You're already there. Interesting. Yeah, so you've passed that pinnacle of good, right? You pass that pinnacle of good, you've strayed into this valley of despair.

You're on the down slope, maybe you're in the bottom of that pit. One of the things that we already touched on briefly is recalibrating who you're comparing yourself to. Because probably if you're in that greatness trap, you're starting to compare yourselves with people who are even closer and closer and closer to great test.

There's a big difference there and we'll touch on that in a minute. So if you instead look back and compare yourself to people who are good, it's a little easier to see how far you've come. And that's a little bit more interesting.

And maybe invigorating. Yeah, the second mitigation when you find yourself in that valley of despair is to return to what made the practices joyful. And this does take a bit of doing.

The guide's helpful in this way. You can skip to phase four pretty safely if you're already good at something. You can skip phases one through three and you go straight to phase four and deploy those units.

Those units are focused on how do I very specifically look at what I'm doing and why it was joyful and then recreate that. Or in the case of being good at something, create it. But if I'm in the greatness trap, I'm mired in the valley of despair, I can sort of just almost magically transport myself back to that first peak and say, okay, I'm just gonna be good right now and I'm just gonna focus on the things that brought me joy when I was good before I slid downhill.

And it's not like your skills will decrease but your mindset in thinking of yourself in that good realm really is very freeing. It's very freeing. And not for nothing.

Sometimes it'll shake something loose too. Oh, sure. And then the final sort of greatness trap, that feeling of emptiness, that lack of fulfillment.

How do we deal with that? That's a tough one. That one is the toughest. That's a tough one.

This is one that we both have struggled with. The problem that you're running into is pretty foundational, which is that you have invested so much of yourself and so much time and so much effort and the return is never gonna be there. Yeah, it's not what you expect the return to be is not what it is.

And it's hard, right? Because at this point, your perspective has changed from when you started. Like I said, this idea is pretty near and dear to us. So we'll talk some more on Patreon and I think that'll do it for us.

Yeah, I mean, the upshot of this is, you know, yeah, it's okay to be great. It's okay to be great. There are some downsides.

There are some traps. You got to work to mitigate those. And by and large, it's an inefficient process.

But there's nothing inherently wrong with it. You know, you just got to deal with those traps. All right, buddy.

Well, we will see you in the outro. Well, gee, thanks, everybody. Sure do appreciate you taking the time here on the main feed talking.

Is it okay to be great? And it sure is. You just got to be a little careful. This one has a lot of fodder for the Patreon.

So by all means, go over and check it out. Patreon.com slash Get Good Guide. As always, check out the center of the Get Good Galaxy.

They're at getgood.guide. We are so very grateful for your time. As always, I'm Erick. That's Nick.

We're the Get Good Guys. And this is the Get Good Guide.

Squwee-dop. Salt peanuts, salt peanuts.