The Greatest Wesner writes that a couple of readers criticized him for his desire to aspire for greatness. Well obviously Wesner, you should aspire for mediocrity! In any case, one reader comments,

YOU do not get to tell if you are great or not.

And I agree that you do not get to decide if “history” or the public at large considers you to be “great” in whatever definition of that word you mean. However that misses the point entirely. Who gives a rat’s ass what the public thinks.

Visualize Greatness Wesner’s point is that his life is under his control, not that of others. Therefore it does not really matter whether the public sees him as great. Rather, he will strive for greatness and let the chips fall where they may. At least that’s my take on it, and you know I’m never wrong.

A valuable lesson I learned a long time ago is to behave as if you’ve reached where you want to be. You want to be a better soccer player, adopt the habits and obtain the mindset of a better player. You want to be a better developer, behave like one. This goes beyond simply visualizing your goals and has applications in many facets of life.

Business My first job out of college was at a very small consulting company. We wanted to grow and be a larger, well organized, well executing company. However there were times I would get frustrated at our progress and our perceived lack of professionalism. It occurred to me one day that I had to stop whining about it and start behaving as if we were already the company we strived to be. So we worked at it, became better organized, and started executing like a more professional firm (certainly with our ups and downs). We started to behave like a well run larger firm and it worked!

Relationships Despite all evidence to the contrary, I wasn’t exactly a ladies man growing up, and a lot of it had to do with lack of self confidence. It wasn’t till college that I started to get my “flow” going. In part this was a result of starting to behave in a confident manner as if I was already God’s gift to women. Sure enough, it had an effect. Just ask my wife about the night we met. Perhaps I was a bit too confident. ;)

For me, I’m not necessarily striving for greatness. Greatness is a very vague term. I would prefer well-liked and well-respected. That would do nicely. Just remember, it’s not wrong to strive for greatness or other goals, just behave in a manner of one who has achieved the goals.