Why Most People Won’t Ever Achieve Greatness

100/100 people can achieve greatness. Here’s why most won’t.

Anthony Moore
6 min readApr 16, 2021

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Anyone can achieve greatness. Anyone.

Greatness is relative, yes. The results might look different; for some, simply quitting an addiction means greatness. For others, creating a Fortune 500 company means greatness.

Anyone can do this. But most people won’t.

I’m not talking about simple averages and logistics, where “obviously everyone can’t be in the top 5%.” That’s bull. If you take a class of 100 students, 100 students could achieve greatness.

This is because we all have a choice, every moment of every day. As author Rebecca Eanes once wrote, “In between every action and reaction, there is a space.” In this moment, you choose how you will react.

This moment is very small, sometimes small enough we don’t believe it’s there. This is where phrases like “I had no choice” or “I couldn’t help it” come from. Yes, you could. You just chose not to. Stop lying to yourself.

More and more people are hiding behind the excuse that their behaviors, actions, and choices are out of their control. They claim the economy, Donald Trump, their boss, their landlord, the cops, societal norms, and a hundred other things control their life.

It’s time to unlearn this prison of a belief. Not dissect it, or analyze it, or debate it.

Just completely unlearn it.

Why Is So Much of the World Mediocre?

“Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.” -Jim Collins

You may wonder: if 100 out of 100 people could achieve greatness, why do so few ever do?

It’s not even that they tried and failed, either; most people never even try at all. They spend their lives without even as much as an attempt to create their masterpiece.

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Anthony Moore

Writer for CNBC, Business Insider, Fast Company, Thought Catalog, Yahoo! Finance, and you.