Several months ago, I had the pleasure of attending a motivational speech given by successful Disney animator Saul Blinkoff. As a middle-class male from Long Island, Blinkoff was well qualified to speak to ambitious Binghamton University students about the achievement of greatness. The speech was well orated, but sent me along a less-than-motivational thought process that revealed some dangers of lusting after “greatness.”
Blinkoff described his journey to personal and vocational success. He spoke of an immensely fulfilling clarity he achieved that allowed him to know why he worked hard in life and what his purpose was as a man, a husband and a father.
His icebreaker was most memorable: “People want greatness. Do you aspire to be mediocre?” Obviously, people said no — they wanted to be the best.
The hour-long treatise left me reeling. I found myself feeling that I should desire greatness, but I didn’t have any clearer idea of how to achieve it than I did before the speech. Blinkoff’s words didn’t emphasize the joy he received from creating art — they emphasized the clean satisfaction he had for having dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s that life had dictated him to. This preciseness allowed him to feel “great.” I hadn’t identified the i’s and t’s within my own life and wasn’t even close to completing them. I feared that even if I attempted to do so, I would never feel as fulfilled as Blinkoff proclaimed to be.
I have passions and curiosities that I intend to pursue in life. As for my be-all and end-all career, I’m still largely “fundecided.” Because of this, instead of excitement toward success within a specific career, the speech offered me a paralyzing, nonsensical volition to pursue greatness for the naked sake of being amazing.
It’s not inherently harmful to want to be the best doctor or lawyer or business-savvy individual that you can be. The problem is desiring recognition while failing to consider the pleasure that comes with creating and doing things for their own sake.
The compulsion to be great and the anxiety that comes along with it are fabricated. In actuality, you are not required to be great. If you were to accept this and eradicate the conditioned fear of failure to achieve success, you might never find a compulsion to be great. You might never move beyond having influence over a small group of people, and that’s OK.
We use greatness to incite competition, which is fine, but being great for the sake of being great is a narcissistic and empty motivation that will leave us trapped in a cycle of negative thoughts.
In an effort to see students succeed, Saul Blinkoff caused me to desire greatness before I stopped to realize what greatness actually makes fulfilling; the genuine pursuit of pastimes that move us happily and more excitedly forward.