Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about personal greatness.
The specific question I’ve been getting real with:
“What would it mean to create a majestic, legendary life… to follow the call of my heart, no matter what… to do what I dream?”
Personal greatness to me isn’t about external perceptions and validations, but rather a deeply-felt internal experience.
It’s about building a life, supported by my entrepreneurial success, that feels majestic and legendary to me.
My own call to personal greatness is leading me westward into the high desert later this year, to create a new life of ultra-minimalism, greater self-sufficiency, and closer communion with nature, Spirit, community, and myself.
A life where my business comes into even deeper alignment with my mission, skills, superpowers, and the work I love most. A life where I creatively self-express more, too.
Here’s the thing about personal greatness:
It requires us to prove ourselves worthy of it.
It demands sacrifices—we have to give up certain status quo’s, comforts, and frames of mind to open the way to this state of being.
We have to move through feelings like uncertainty, fear, and grief.
We’re confronted with our own naked self-worth and self-trust.
And we have to get OK with being perceived in ways that we’re not comfy with just yet, because personal greatness is a concept that many folks—probably most—are so far removed from, that they’ll never “get it”.
This means relationships can change, too.
These are what I call the Gates of Greatness.
Those heavy, scary gates we must be willing to open and move through in order to actualize our most visionary, soul-fulfilling dreams.
So the question I pose to you today is:
What is personal greatness to you?
Below I’ll offer up some additional questions and ideas to sit with as you explore this potentially life-changing concept. Let’s dive in.
Becoming The One
One of the challenges of exploring personal greatness is that we just haven’t been taught (or encouraged) to truly dream big.
We’ve been taught to dream reasonable.
To dream safe.
To dream in a way that’s convenient for others, without rocking the boat too much.
So as you consider that foundational question of “What is personal greatness to you?”, consider contemplating and journaling the following as well:
1: What do I already know I need to do, that I keep not doing?
2: What emotions do I feel that keep me from doing it?
3: What unpleasant scenarios do I envision?
4: What’s the actual worst that can happen if I do it?
5: Can I live with that?
6: If so, what’s one small step into it I can take?
7: When will I take this small step?
Personal greatness isn’t something we have to jump into all at once.
I see it more as something to artfully and intentionally craft over time. It’s something we feel our way into and cultivate. We can start small—as small as we need to.
Essentially, we’re building a bridge:
From our unsatisfying status quo, to our vision of personal greatness—a vision that can, and most likely will, evolve as we do.
As we build the bridge into it, plans will change. This is good, because it means we’re gaining clarity on what really matters to us, and what’s working (and not working) along the way.
This bridge is built one plank at a time.
And we’ll come to many checkpoints as we build and cross it in real time: new gates to open and move through.
This way of life isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s continually meeting ourselves at the edge of our comfort zones, and choosing the call of our hearts and souls over familiar comforts and status quo.
It’s a deep intertwining of life, meaning, relationships, and entrepreneurial ambition—where each informs and influences the others—in a glorious dance that sometimes feels like flow, and sometimes feels like tension.
Because this is the nature of Being Alive.
And we’re here to do great things, both for ourselves and in our devotion to others.
So we choose to move through the gates… knowing that among all the scary and intense stuff, we’ll also find the support we need from our True People—those who are truly for us, loving us, encouraging us, and building alongside us.
And we’ll be there for them, too.
Because personal greatness isn’t a one-player game. We need each other.
Stay gold. I love you.
See ya next Wednesday.
–Daniel
