Great Isn’t More of Good

For each entry, I spend 20–30% of my time writing and 70–80% editing.

I make a meaningful effort to be detailed and brief. These opposites hold writers in a strange tension: My thoughts must be both clear and descriptive.

If I use alliterations in every paragraph, the readers become tired; and if I use adverbs haphazardly, the writing becomes messy. The best writers bend words to their whim but are careful not to break the latticework of language.

So, specifically, what do I mean when I say Good and Great?

Good is above-average. There are Good students and Good employees. There are Good books and Good movies. The world needs Good. And we can find Goodness in the world.

Most people think Great is simply a higher degree of Good, but this is wrong. Simply put, a large amount of Good does not constitute Great.

Two thousand unhappy users is not equivalent to one happy, paying customer. Two hundred pages of sloppy writing does not turn a hack into Shakespeare. Coming in fifth place five times is not the same as winning.

Good is achievable by (materially) all and Great is achieved by a select few.

Almost everyone can run a mile, but very few get to State Championships. Those who get to State are fast, but very few people win. And very few who win at State go on to compete in the Olympics.

And, even then, after years of dieting and training and running, only one person per event can take home Gold. We look back — as if inevitable — that a medalist succeeded.

But what is inevitable?

A single injury could end one career, and immortalize another.

In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of his life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled.

…

Nevertheless, when one says, “You are nothing else but what you live,” it does not imply that an artist is to be judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things contribute no less to his definition as a man. What we mean to say is that a man is no other than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organisation, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (1946)