Sunday, April 07, 2013

Everyday Greatness


Yesterday I spend a day with a few hundred men at my church at our annual Men's Retreat and one of the topics which came up for consideration was how we as men achieve greatness everyday in our missions to be all that God is calling us to be in this life time. Surely there are as many answers to this question as there are pairs of ears to hear it. As I sat and meditated on this, my own answer emerged and I'd like to share it here.

1. Practicing the Great Commandment as stated in the Bible, to love God, self, neighbor and enemy. Its seems to me, and I have increasing personal experience to confirm this, that an intention of love in all actions does as much as anything to bring out our unique greatness as anything else. It overcomes inappropriate ego drive, hate, fear, undue selfishness. 

2. Resisting comparison as this practice robs all perception of greatness of its effectiveness as one's greatness is one's unique posture to occupy in the world and if you use a comparative definition another's will always seem to overshadow your own. Knowing my own posture and cherishing and being satisfied of the unique greatness of that is critical to showing up as great everyday. I recommend my prior post on this topic at, http://wiseworking.blogspot.com/2008/01/self-comparison-better-than-other.html.  

3. Developing mastery, a practice of operating at a level of high creativity in a space of one's natural giftedness for purposes that benefit one's self, network, community, society and the world. I highly recommend Robert Greene's lecture on this topic at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sYmQFPXmJA 

4. Practicing patient persistence as achieving greatness as a result of practicing the first 3 points requires patient persistence. This path is not easy and continually dis-courage-ing, one must cultivate a commitment to proceeding with patience and not prone to giving up knowing that greatness is a journey more than a destination and that at anytime we are great, if only in the eyes of our mothers, and have the potential to achieve even greater degrees of greatness. I recommend my prior post on this topic at: http://wiseworking.blogspot.com/2007/11/patience-persistence-2-practices-worth.html.


So here is to our showing up and acknowledging our greatness everyday.

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