What Makes Things Great…
I’ve been doing some experimenting with my breakfast (maximizing some might say, eh?) and when you have a commitment to producing great things, you’ll go to eleven about it.
And the way we talk about producing greatness often focuses a lot on the work required (and as I wrote about my Turkish Eggs iteration this morning). I’m absolutely not saying the way I do it isn’t “a lot of work required” and also…
There are a lot of people who can produce greatness very quickly. Not everything has to be forty-five plates of Turkish Eggs in order to get the perfect bite.
No matter where we fall on the scale of greatness production (whether we think adequate is exceptional; whether we think fast is great; whether we think precise is great… whatever our “great”), we often feel judged by other people.
Or we feel like “no one else understands how to produce greatness” because they don’t do it “how it should be done” which is code for “how I do it.”
I don’t know why this struck me so hard today, but we spend an awful lot of time either judging ourselves as flawed because we’re not like other people, or judging other people as lazy or bad or unmotivated because they’re not like us. (Probably the same person will do both. No one has a corner on this.)
What if we just didn’t worry about anyone else for a hot minute? What if we only worried about ourself and our own search for how to make ourselves great? What if we were just introspective for a minute, looking inward to how our greatness-production is going?
I think this is why I like Strengths so much. A lot of us worry a lot about other people and how other people are doing. Helping other people. Saying the smart thing so others know we have value. Being critical so other people will know where they are wrong. Worrying that others are being too hard on themselves. Worrying others are thinking wrong about something.
(And some of you who are extra hyper self-critical need to ignore all this whole post… honestly… this is not for you to be more extremely critical of yourself… let other people carry this cross today. I mean it.)
But when I talk about producing greatness, I mean some of us write our best work fast and without thinking.
Some of us write our best work slow and methodical.
Some do our best work learning how to get better.
Some do our best work being intuitive and not being too aware.
Some do our best work focusing. Some not focusing.
That nuance of our best alignment is pretty important. And because I want the best plate of Turkish Eggs, I want to work extra hard to figure out all the elements and how they work together and how I can get the best out of each one of them.
I wonder if a couple of my high Maximizer friends will read this and see the themselves here. (I’ll tag you.) I sure do, now, thanks to Julie. But I care about things being the best they can be.
And when you’re wired like me, you need each individual element to be the best it can be. That’s how the whole dish becomes its best. But I learned that through learning myself. Yes, Strengths helped. Enneagram helped. But ultimately, they’re just guideposts to help the experiments have more clarity.
The process is the thing.
Deep thoughts for a Monday. Love to you all.
– Becca
