To Achieve Greatness.

Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. It's one of Shakespeare's most quoted lines. But almost nobody remembers where it comes from. In Twelfth Night those words sit in a forged letter, planted as a joke, and the man who reads them waits for greatness to be handed over. Four hundred years later, most people are still reading that letter. This video is about the one path of the three you actually control: what greatness is (and why it is not fame), Hesiod's road that is rough at first, picking one mountain, practising at the edge of your ability, Samuel Johnson's three hours a day, the workshop of obscurity, Confucius and the last basket of earth, and the great soul that Longinus said all great work echoes. SOURCES William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 5 (the letter Malvolio finds; shown here in the First Folio of 1623) · Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 289–292 · Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), chapter 13 · Confucius, Analects 9.19 (9.18 in some editions) · Longinus, On the Sublime, 9.2 · on practice at the edge of ability: K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer, "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance" (Psychological Review, 1993) ARTWORK Paintings, drawings, prints and books from the public domain and open-access museum collections (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum, Statens Museum for Kunst, Städel Museum and others). Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623): Lehigh University Libraries copy, via the Internet Archive, CC BY 4.0. Hippocrates Refusing the Gifts of Artaxerxes, engraving after Anne-Louis Girodet: Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0. #greatness #philosophy #selfimprovement #discipline #shakespeare #stoicism #motivation