Many of us nurture the desire to become great in life and we want to learn how. Whether it is in your chosen line of business or your personal life as an individual, greatness is always the goal. We all have the potential of becoming great and with the right effort, this is very attainable.
You have a story of your journey in life and professionally, as everyone else does.
Most likely you remember where you started from, and how you’ve gradually grown to be where you are right now.
In your business establishment, for instance, you might feel that you are not at the level you wish to be.
Hence, your goal remains to keep on growing and going from just being good to becoming better and then great.
You no doubt know of individuals within and outside your industry, who are influential people and can be put on the pedestal of greatness.
These are generally regarded as successful men and women, and your desire is to be mentioned in the same sentence as them someday.
Well, one thing you need to be assured of is that you have the potential of becoming great in life.
If you set your mind to anything or endeavor in life, you would not only do just fine in it but become great at it.
However, you need to note that for you to attain this status, you need to have more than talent or abilities.
Your talent must be matched with an equal degree of effort and deliberate action to achieve greatness.
Also, there must be a plan on how you want to go from where you are to the apex and become great.
Everything you have to do in your quest for greatness would be considered in this article.
How to Become Great – What Does it Mean to Become Great?
The word ‘greatness’ on its own is used to describe the condition of something being of the highest intensity, amount, and value.
When something is said to be great, it means it is well above average, and better than just being good.
Such a thing has attained the optimum level both in quality, quantity, and characteristics, depending on the context.
For you as an individual, becoming great also works on the same principles.
Well, being great is more of a feeling than it is a rule, nor does it have a particular definition or description.
When you are at a point in life, where you feel that you have achieved the best life has to offer, judging by the expectations you set for yourself, you begin to feel greatness.
As an entrepreneur, you can measure greatness when you can attain expertise in your area of specialization.
You can say you have become great when you have consistently made progress from being good to get better and are now at the optimal level.
For you as a business owner or professional in your field, you would have been able to attain distinction and honor in such field.
Becoming great is also not a feeling that only you share, but others around you can tell and attest to your greatness.
That means being great goes beyond just saying you are great or assuming that.
Your level of influence on others both directly and indirectly would also add credence to your status of greatness.
How to Become Great – Qualities You Must Cultivate to Become Great
Whatever your discipline, talent, area of specialization and industry is, greatness doesn’t come automatically.
Most likely, you are at a point in your career journey where you feel that you are doing ‘just fine, and can say you are good.
However, in other to attain self-satisfaction and an optimal state of fulfillment, your aim should be to learn how to become great.
To achieve this status in your chosen field and profession, there are certain qualities you need to develop and cultivate.
Here are a few of them:
Goal-Oriented
This is one of the most important qualities that every professional or business leader aspiring for greatness should have.
When you look at it, it is not hard to see why setting clear goals and working on them is needed for greatness.
What goals do for you is put your life plans on a certain trajectory and direct the course and decisions you take.
If you are looking at becoming great in your field and area of specialization, you should always be goal-oriented.
And that means setting both short-term and long-term goals and making sure every action and decision you take is aligned with those goals.
If you do otherwise, you might just be good enough or at worst mediocre, without really achieving greatness.
Humility
Contrary to what some might think that greatness is synonymous with pride or being pompous, the reverse is the case.
In your need to learn how to become great, be aware that one of the qualities that characterize great people is humility.
Being great doesn’t mean you lord yourself or opinions over others, neither does it mean you feel superior over everyone else.
Instead, you can learn how to become great when you see yourself as the least significant individual amongst others.
One of the things that humility will do for you is that it allows you to learn from others.
Because you are humble, you do not assume that you know everything, but rather you modestly acknowledge that you need help.
And of course, in your path towards greatness, continuous learning and knowledge acquisition cannot be overlooked.
Only when you cultivate the quality of humility can you be adept at learning, which you need to learn on how to become great.
Knowledgeable
Becoming great in a chosen career path, field or industry requires a lot of in-depth knowledge in that area.
Remember that when you are considered as one of the all-time greats in your field, people see you as an expert.
Hence, you cannot afford to stay mediocre in your knowledge or satisfied with just knowing little in your field.
On the contrary, you must invest yourself in gaining as much knowledge as possible in that area.
That way, you are always ready to offer your input and solutions, as it should be for one who is a great person in that industry.
Persistence
Every worthwhile endeavor in life comes with varying challenges and difficulties along the way.
In the same vein, when you are on the path to becoming great, you are going to face some level of difficulty.
It could be that there are innovations and advancements in your business industry that you will need to adapt to.
This period of adaptation is anything but easy.
Hence, for you not to easily give up or cave in under pressure and challenges, you need the quality of persistence.
Having persistence will help you to stay on your path and keep doing your best regardless of whatever challenges you encounter.
Consistency
As important as hard work is in forging greatness in a person, consistency is even more important.
Consistency is the quality of staying committed and regular in the effort you put into becoming great.
That means for you to achieve greatness, you need more than just a few moments of hard work and dedication.
On the contrary, you need to stay on a regular trajectory, maintaining the same level of dedication, hard work, and commitment throughout.
It is not just enough to be good sometimes and not be good enough at other times.
You need to stay consistent if you want to achieve your goal of becoming great.
Optimism
Being optimistic simply means having a positive attitude towards something, believing in the success of such.
It is the opposite of pessimism, which is a negative outlook that makes you expect the worst rather than the best of situations.
The former rather than the latter is what you need to become great.
To achieve greatness, you must always be confident in your abilities, and the face of different situations and opportunities.
It is when you are optimistic that you are more likely to take the opportunities that are open to you and record success.
If you are pessimistic on the other hand, it can make you generally expect the worse, and you end up letting great opportunities pass you by.
And of course, one of the steps you can take towards greatness is recognizing great opportunities and taking them.
Optimism is a quality that will help you achieve this.
Integrity
Every great individual you know is usually men and woman of integrity.
While the work you put in professionally in your career can help you become great, your morals are also important.
For you to attain greatness as a person, you must be trustworthy and have integrity.
It would not be beneficial for you if you have a reputation of being someone dishonest in daily life and business dealings.
When you cultivate the quality of integrity, it helps you to win the trust of others easily, an essential step towards greatness.
Self-Discipline
Many negative factors might affect your path to greatness.
Some of these are procrastination, lack of self-control, distractions e.t.c.
For you to successfully overcome these factors that come in form of challenges, you must cultivate self-discipline.
Having self-discipline will help you to stick to your goals and targets, not allowing minor or major distractions to sway you.
And being able to stay focused even amid distractions is an important step towards becoming great at what you do.
Great Passion
This is a case of saving the best for last.
To achieve success and how to become great in whatever endeavor one has in life, it is very important to be passionate about this.
Having a passion for what you do is having a great feeling about it, being convinced of the importance, and deriving joy in it.
When you are passionate, it helps you to be more creative and innovative in your approach towards such activities.
Additionally, when you face challenges along the way, which is inevitable, passion is the one thing that helps you keep your commitment amidst the challenges.
This is why developing a passion for what you do, or better still pursuing a career you are passionate about is essential to becoming great.
How to Become Great – Steps to Take Towards Achieving Greatness
Having seen some of the qualities you can develop in yourself for you to become great, let us now see practical steps you can take towards this.
Before we proceed, you should understand that there is no quick fix in becoming great.
As you already know, achieving greatness is a gradual process, and it is best to go from being good to be better and then becoming great.
Hence, the steps we will consider now are the essential steps that will gradually push you towards greatness.
Also, even when you feel that you are already “a great” in your field/industry, it still takes effort and consistency to remain relevant.
Therefore, here are some of the steps you can take to become great at anything in you or be great as an individual:
Invest in Knowledge Acquisition
Putting it simply, you cannot be a dumb person and still be considered a great individual, especially as a business owner.
Every great businessman or woman is considered to be sufficiently knowledgable in their chosen field.
In other words, they are well equipped with vast knowledge about the history of their industry, trends, and changes.
Additionally, when there are glaring problems in that industry, these are at the forefront of researching and proving solutions to those problems.
Hence, we cannot overemphasize the importance of knowledge acquisition towards achieving greatness.
As the popular saying goes: “readers are leaders”.
Therefore, regardless of how much you feel you know now, you cannot stop acquiring knowledge and learning new things about your industry.
Also, stay up to date about the present trends and changes happing in your field, so you can be well-informed.
You would need this knowledge and the application as a step on your path to becoming great.
Pursue Your Passion
A lot of people today have been actively pursuing a career path where they derive little or no joy.
Still, these nurture the ambition of achieving greatness on such a path.
Well, without mincing words, the chances of success of becoming great in such circumstances are minimal or non-existent.
One of the qualities you need to achieve greatness in your industry or as a person as noted earlier is passion.
That means that it is very important that what you are doing right now is what you love and are passionate about.
If you run a business or work just for the money, you might be good, but that is the best you will ever be.
If you want to become great, then you would either need to develop a passion for that which you do or make a switch to an area you are passionate about.
Doing what you love or are passionate about will help you get success in that field, and also overcome challenging situations when they come up.
Maintain Focus
Distractions are an everyday occurrence that every one of us faces, especially at the times we need to complete tasks.
Hence, this can adversely affect you on your journey of becoming great.
Therefore, one of the things you need to become great at is to ward off distractions as best as you can.
One of the things that could be distracting for you is attempting to complete many goals at a time.
While you might be good in many areas, you should understand that you need to focus to become great.
Trying to succeed in too many areas at the same time would not help your cause.
At the very best, you might achieve all those goals, but they will only give you a result that is “good enough”.
For you to become great at anything or be great as a person in an industry, you would need to focus your time and attention on one goal at a time.
This gives you direction and makes your path towards greatness a whole lot easier and faster.
Don’t Always Play it Safe
For you to understand how playing it safe can affect your quest for greatness, think about the steps we take as we grow from infants towards adulthood.
When someone is just a baby, they need to take certain actions as part of the growth process.
There are instances whereby some babies take longer time than others to develop some of their body functions such as walking.
One of the reasons for this is always playing it safe for those babies.
If a baby is going to grow rapidly and effectively, there are certain actions they would need to boldly take, even if it appears to be risky.
Learning to walk for example has its challenges, and the baby might even fall repeatedly.
However, once they take this step and are consistent with it, they can only get better and grow.
The same is true with becoming great in life.
You will need to use the skills of knowledge and action to take certain risks, to be successful.
If you keep sleeping in your comfort zone, so to speak, then achieving greatness will be difficult.
How to Become Great- Stay Consistent
If there is one thing we’ve learned from bodybuilding exercises, it is that consistency is more important than hard work.
A bodybuilder does not only spend a full day of gym work in a week and expects to get good lasting results.
Rather, he/she might have to put in daily efforts, even if the activities he/she engages in daily are for short amounts of time.
That is the type of consistency you need to become great.
It doesn’t matter how much effort you are putting in at a particular time, as long as you stay consistent.
When you are consistent, you slowly build momentum, and the results will gradually start trickling in.
And that gradual growth is what becoming great is all about.
Do not Look for Short Term Results
One thing about being great is that it comes with time and effort.
That means you cannot be looking for a shortcut to achieving greatness.
At best, whatever it is that you achieve quickly can also be lost with that same speed.
This is why you need to realize that a lot of the great things in life take time, and you will need to set long-term goals.
When you have this mindset, even if some of your actions are not yielding results at present, you stay working and committed.
With that, you are sure of getting results in the long term, that which would be more lasting and enduring.
And as such, you don’t just become good but great.
Practice, Practice, Practice
We mentioned that three(3) times to emphasize the importance of this.
It might sound cliche, but you can be good, and even great at whatever it is you set your mind to if you practice enough.
Take, for example, some people have previously been very bad at selling.
In fact, in their minds, they felt that they can never be good salesmen or women.
However, when they decide to put their mind into it and start to practice selling, they eventually become great salespersons.
This can also be the case with you whatever industry it is you belong to or what you want to achieve greatness at.
You must continue to practice the skills and functions that are essential for your career.
The more you practice, the better you get in that areas.
And of course, the process of becoming great is always getting better than what you previously were.
Get Mentors and Role Models
Look around you and on the internet, we have a lot of people who have grown into great personalities.
Some of these people might be in your industry or outside your field.
Regardless of the circumstance, it helps to have a support system as you make the journey towards becoming great.
That means you would need to approach some to become your mentors.
There are various ways you can ask someone to be your mentor.
Another thing you can do if you have great individuals that you wish to learn from makes them your role models.
While it might be impossible to meet such ones at present, you can learn from their stories and experiences.
This would help you shape your own life and business around what worked for them, and help you also become great.
Accept Feedback
One of the qualities you need to develop to become great which we mentioned earlier is humility.
You need this quality for you to keep learning from the opinions and experiences of others.
That means that you will not always have the answers, and you won’t be always right.
Hence, you must be open to receiving feedback from others at any time.
Some of these might come in form of critics, and as such, you should have a positive attitude towards them.
If you freely accept feedback, either good or bad, it can help you on your path to becoming great.
Build and Develop Daily Habits for Growth
Our daily habits they say, are who we are.
What you are going to become in a few years would be a result of the daily habits and routines you set for yourself.
Therefore, regardless of how little they seem, start now to build good habits that make you have discipline and focus.
It might be waking up early, sleeping early, eating healthy, or avoiding certain bad habits.
The more you build and develop these, the more you grow as a person, which will also help you to become great.
In Conclusion – How to Become Great
If you nurture the desire or ambition to become great, that is a very good one to have.
You need to convince yourself that achieving greatness in life is very possible.
And that is the first step towards getting there.
Also, remember that being great is not something that happens at the snap of a finger or automatically.
On the contrary, it takes a lot of effort, commitment, and above all consistency to get there.
Therefore, take your time to look at some of the qualities we’ve so far discussed and see which ones you are currently lacking.
Then, work on developing these in yourself and putting them into practice daily.
They will help you to be successful in life, be an inspirational leader, and above all become great.
