Demand greatness of yourself. I was reading another self improvement book, full of useful ideas and knowledge, passages from Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, yet this simple phrase triggered something in me.
I’ve noticed that things that truly trigger have some deeper reasoning for why they resonate with me.
Demand greatness sounds kinda like something a Chad in a frat house would say. Most people would disregard it as toilet paper philosophy and move on with their day. Yet I can’t let it go.
Even after listening to meditations, a workout, the echo of this phrase is still ringing in my head.
Curiously, this isn’t the first time a seemingly simple phrase has resonated with me like this. It is only recently that I’ve tried to stop and think for a while to see what parts of me care about it so much. Is there a childhood trauma that gets triggered? Is this one of my core values, rephrased? Is this something that I long for, yet shut down deep in myself?
I think demanding greatness is my answer to watching myself fall short of the mark for so long. It stops being entertaining after a while. One grows older and wiser and experiences the fragility and shortness of life. There is no time to be mediocre.
This is day 13 of 50 and I am already seeing how effective daily journaling is. It’s time to pause and gather your thoughts. To think about something important and not just forget about it, but to organise these ideas, put them together into a (somewhat) cohesive text, which will hopefully be useful to oneself or others.
Also I feel like an itch now, I want to sit down and write. I want to see what’s actually going on in my mind. Of course what comes out is often nonsensical and kind of all over the place, but imagine how chaotic it becomes if you never sit down, pause and try to organise it.
Yet that’s exactly what all of us do every day. That’s exactly how one becomes old and senile. A lifetime of ideas, memories and experiences without a folder, without a system of organisation, unprocessed, in a pile, a mess, inaccessible and chaotic. We drive ourselves to madness one day at a time.
That is not ok. Demand greatness of yourself.