Achieving greatness

Are you sure the climb will be worth it? (Image by Rappellingusa)

In 1997, Alanis Morrissette went to India.

After touring behind her super-duper-smash hit album Jagged Little Pill, she took some time off. She returned with a sense of gratitude and bliss.

And of course, she never had another album that reached the same heights as her 1995 breakthrough. (Hardly anyone has.)

It’s not surprising that the tortured artist is such an enduring stereotype in our culture. I mean, the tortured artist has something to prove, so it makes sense that they are the ones who will push through discomfort to achieve their goal, no matter how much pain it causes them.

A, they’re used to pain.

B, their pain drives them.

C, the failed artists are invisible and we only hear about the successful ones.

The successful artists don’t find out until after they have reached the pinnacle of success that it doesn’t make them feel the way they thought it would.

That’s only if they’re successful and self-aware. Otherwise, they will believe that the resolution to their misery will come from scaling some even higher peak.

Luckily for Alanis Morrissette, she took the time to reflect. She didn’t chase greater accomplishments. She seems to have focused instead on simply making art and finding joy in the little things in life.

Here’s what I have tried to do, along with many people like me: I skipped the phenomenal worldwide success and cut straight to simply making art and finding joy in the little things in life.

To many people, this looks like failure. It’s the thing that they are afraid of. They have so much to prove that, to paraphrase a recent comment by Eva Longoria, they can’t take their foot off the gas.

Granted, there is a certain amount of privilege in being able to let go and not try so hard. But for the perpetual strivers, when will you get to say that you’ve made it? Maybe never, if you are constantly worried that it will all be taken away. Or if the lifestyle you require takes a high level of maintenance. Or if you’ve got a bunch of people who are depending on you and it feels like you’re on a runaway train.

I don’t know. I’ve never actually been there, so I can only imagine what it’s like, piecing it together from the many firsthand accounts. It’s safe to say, however, that achieving greatness does not lead to feeling good about yourself. That seems to be separate endeavor.

I admire those who, with full awareness of this truth, pursue greatness anyway. They know what it will cost them, but they are on a mission that is bigger than themselves. Martin Luther King, Jr. Gandhi. Jeanne d’Arc. The martyrs of various faiths.

These people aren’t doing what they do to further their professional reputation or legacy. They’re doing it for a cause that they value more than their life. Hopefully, they’re not just trying to outrun feelings of inadequacy. It’s a choice they’re making.

And that’s the beauty of it. We do have a choice about how far we want to go and how much we want to try. We get to decide how much effort we want to put into one aspect of our lives relative to the others. And it’s perfectly reasonable to not want to go all the way with something, no matter how much we’ve already invested or how disappointed someone else is going to be if we let it go.

In short, I don’t think achieving greatness in life is as important as we make it. True, the world would be a lesser place without the contributions of people like William Shakespeare and Johann Sebastian Bach. But what about the wives who facilitated their greatness? What about the wives of all of the men whose names we don’t know whose descendants nonetheless carry forward their legacies today? Who’s to say that one life is worth more than another?

There must be some other measure than achievement that we can use to determine the value of our lives, then. I choose joy, to the extent that I wish to quantify it at all. How about you?