Chapter 95: How Can I Be Great?

Students have lots of questions at the end of the semester and most of them have to do with getting jobs. They ask about career paths and balancing work and life. But until the end of last semester no student had ever asked what it took to become great. 

The student, whom I must refer to not by her given name of Frances but by her nickname “Pickle” because it is maybe the best nickname ever, had surprised me because she was not the sort of relentless must-win-Pulitzer-and-Nobel-and-have-my-own-podcast-by-30 sort. Pickle is Australian and carries herself with an ease and casualness that belie her hard work and considerable talent.

I wasn’t quite sure how to reply to her question. I recall talking about the importance of time spent working – hard to achieve greatness in an eight-hour day – and how people who achieve greatness generally have a sense of their own destiny.

We left it at that. And yet in the weeks that followed Pickle’s question stayed with me. What does it take to become great?

So a few days ago, I emailed Pickle to ask why she posed the question. I also sent another email, this one to friends, all of them writers and journalists, who had achieved by any objective measure, success. I didn’t ask them about themselves, but about the qualities they’d seen in others that made them great.

I had, I now see, opened a can of worms. But more on that later.

First, Pickles’ reply. She apologized for rambling but I assured her I didn’t mind. This is, as I now see, a question that is as complicated in the asking as it is in the answering.

Pickle wrote: If I have to think about why I asked you what it takes to be a great journalist, I have to go back to my short career in gymnastics which began when I was seven and ended when I was eleven. Four times a week we would train for several hours and it involved horribly taxing strength training. Gymnasts are sadomasochists, even the seven-year-olds, willing to inflict large amounts of pain upon themselves to reach an objective. When I was seven, I kept journals dedicated to dreams of making the 2016 Rio Olympic team for Australia. In this case, the idea of being great, of being a star, was one of the few things that justified the intensity of training. Why else train that hard?

I’d also think of Damien Chazelle’s 2014 film Whiplash. I watched the film for the first time in cinemas when I was fifteen. I handed in an exam before I was really done with it so that I could make it across Sydney and see the midday show time. I was the only person in the cinema. The movie, which focuses on a jazz drummer who wants to be one of the greatest of all time, elicits strong reactions from different people. My aunt couldn't really understand him, couldn’t understand why he wanted something so badly that depended a lot on luck and clearly didn’t make him very happy in the process. My own mother, however, did understand. She herself spent the duration of my childhood working and running her business. To my mum, being great was a selfless act. It was something that you sacrificed your own life for, something that enhanced the community outside of your immediate family. In turn, being great offered her solace from having to consider what else she should do with her time on Earth.

I asked Michael what makes someone great because often it feels like the elephant in the room at this school. We look around in lecture theaters and study spaces and wonder whose names will be those that we see often in decades to come. We wonder whether anyone will be good enough to be deemed great. There isn’t an air of competition as you would expect, or at least one I don’t feel hanging densely in Pulitzer Hall, but more of curiosity. There’s also a question of why it’s worth it, why work for far longer than the average work day, sacrifice social events or a social life altogether. Why miss important events because you have to be somewhere else?

I wonder for myself, whether being great is something I’d have any interest in doing. The older I get (now that I am no longer fifteen and have been jaded by New York City), the more I find myself distancing from Whiplash. I question whether sacrifice is something I am interested in, and whether I can survive all of the networking and developing of my personal brand for long enough. I question the worth of being remembered after your death when you’ll be dead then anyway. 

Though, I also think that when faced with what feels like only so much time left on Earth, it would be nice to feel like something was worth pursuing so much that you give up another version of yourself for it. 

Most likely, I still believe in a kind of serendipitous greatness. The kind where talent and passion makes you great instead of all the other stuff like networking. The kind where just wanting it, isn’t enough. 

Ultimately, if I am being completely honest, and fairly vulnerable by doing so, if I were to ever be considered “great” or even dare I say it “one of the greats” I’d like it to be because my writing is nice to read. I’d be quite content on my deathbed with that.

So, I asked my friends, how does greatness happen? I asked with an offer of anonymity – I wanted them to be honest, and not feel as if their replies might somehow be seen as a statement about themselves. Suffice it to say they include Pulitzer Prize and PEN award winners, the editor of a very big city newspaper, a celebrated scholar, a legendary columnist, and a visionary editor.

These are their responses:

-I've talked about this in my classes. My thoughts: Give your readers/audience something they probably never thought of before that will deepen their understanding of the world, and be a good person while you're at it. Do this once, and you'll do something great. Do it consistently, over and over -- if not every time -- and you'll be great.

Addendum: Over the course of the term, I keep my eyes out for something great that each student has done -- a piece of important news uncovered, an original insight, a beautiful turn of phrase -- and I make sure the student sees the great thing they've done and how impressive it is. I'll say something like, "Wow! This is as good as it gets," so they see that they have greatness in them.

-I suggest that the answer to your student's question is: Make things happen.

-I met an architect recently: he showed me his work. Magnificent, elegant, distinct, just wonderful. He was also very successful. But he wanted to show me a canoe he had recently built by hand: also an amazing piece of work. I asked why the canoe, and he said he had finally realized he would never be “great” as an architect/designer and so had given up the profession. He had enough money and time from years of being merely fantastic to devote his time to something he loved: canoeing. I think anyone else might have said he was “great.” Not to him. 

I remember years ago reading “Parting the Waters” and reading about MLK’s early life: mediocre student, liked to play pool and hang out. He was clearly unusual and talented — came from a family where preaching and activism were at the fore — but there seemed little indication from his formative years that he would become not just great but historic. I always wondered: What line did he cross?

Long windup is for a reason. Part of the question is: what’s great? To be at the top of your field, competent and successful in every apparent way, like the architect? Or transformational, like MLK?

My own answer is mostly cliches with a sort of mysticism. I think being incredibly good, at the top, like the architect, is some combination of innate talent, preparation, some sense of vision, ambition, hard work, the right moment and yes, in a lot of cases, being born to the right family. 

Being “great” is all that, plus some unknown where the person and the moment fuse into something almost magic and undefinable. It’s rare and maybe that’s good since “greatness” can be good or bad (or some combo: just read a biography of Napoleon: great for sure, but at what cost?) 

-Seems like being just incredibly good is an admirable goal — and hard enough on its own. 

Greatness may well happen to you.

-Greatness: part of it is just showing up. I have been thinking about this while rereading Janet Malcolm and EB White. They kept writing. They kept not being done. Of course there are great single author books. Margaret Mitchell. Harper Lee. But the writer who keeps writing and keeps exploring with purpose—that can be part of what leads to greatness. The other thing they both share is the amazing single sentence that  captures something and turns it around, like the last sentence in White’s Once More to the Lake

-So what it takes to be "great" may depend on your definition of "great." If it means to be incredibly skilled and widely admired that's one thing, and good luck (because luck is one ingredient, as is privilege and hard work). But if being great means to truly be of service to the people in the particular community who need and depend on your work,  that's another measure of greatness. We need both kinds, I guess, but I'd rather have more of the second group. For them, being great may mean not worrying too much about being great.

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-There’s a classic old British quote, don’t ask me by whom, which runs something like “some are born into greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them.” That pretty much correlates with the famous old cricketer quote from Wilfred Rhodes, who was, naturally from Yorkshire, “coometh the hour, coometh the man.” (Mr Rhodes was a great bowler not known for his batting but he once saved England from defeat with his bat: that was his explanation).

I think there’s some truth in both. My translation is that it’s a combination of luck, timing and application

-From what I’ve seen, it is even harder to sustain than it is to achieve. Talent, hard work and competitive edge can sustain greatness in athletics or business, but not in the arts. Achieving greatness in the arts requires finding an inspiring subject, stumbling on a distinctive phrase or fragment of a song, being in an environment where one has the encouragement to build on the idea. Sustaining greatness in the arts requires all those stars to align again and again. That requires good fortune.

-My guess is that the qualities of greatness in a writer are pretty much unique to that person and her circumstances. The advice of Lance Morrow, formerly of Time and a great writer, gave to me a long time ago--"Read and read and read, and write and write and write"--still holds. But it's probably not enough. I think every great writer tries to transcend the thing he's writing about, whether it's fiction or non, and is aiming for something more lyrical in form or universal in meaning, what in Spanish is called duende.

​​-Read, read, read. But don't read as a reader. Read as a writer. Break down why the lede works, why the descriptions of characters are indelible, why the sense of place is vivid, why the transitions are seamless, why the story flows...Then absorb all this into your own writing. 

-One secret of being great is not trying too hard to be great. Trying too hard produces prose that is over-written and often pretentious. The point is not to demonstrate how clever you are (unless you're Oscar Wilde), but to tell a story or make a point in ways that strike the reader as powerful and original.

-Generosity of spirit, clear and vivid style — in writing as well as in life.

So, to the can of worms: I’ve been struck in talking with students, colleagues and friends how deeply the question of greatness resonates, and how people struggle with accepting the desire, working to achieve it, worrying that doing so will exact too great a cost, and worrying too if they have what it takes – and whether it matters.

With that in mind, I’d like to open up the conversation and invite your comments, thoughts, questions, and perhaps fears.

We invite you to add your comments to this page, or if you prefer email us at thedelacortereview@gmail.com
We’ll come back to you with what people are saying. 

We’re eager to hear what you’re thinking.

Thanks