You Can Choose To Be Great, But Not What You’re Great At

I think it’s safe to say that no one is great at anything by accident.

So in one sense, greatness is a choice.

We choose to be great.

You get to decide, ‘I’m going to take this craft, sport, talent, profession, discipline, genre, or subject as far as I am capable of taking it.’

That’s up to you.

But on the other hand, I don’t know if you get to choose what you’re great at. I don’t want to be too mystical about it, but I think what we get called to do is a confluence of circumstances that are not up to us. When we’re born—not up to us. Where we’re born—not up to us. If we’re male or female, short or tall, from a rich family or a poor one—not up to us. Why does this light me up and that lights you up? Why does math come easy to some but not to others? Why does this genre of music grab you instead of that one? Why is it writing for me and picking stocks for you? Teaching yoga for one person, teaching chemistry for another?

I don’t know, but I don’t think it is up to us.

There is something a little bit unfair about this. I think about this with my friend Paul Rabil, who I got to work with on his book ​The Way of the Champion​. Paul is considered the greatest lacrosse player of all time. He chose to be great. In the book, he talks about a coach who told him the key to being a great lacrosse player was simple: ​take one hundred shots a day​. If you get one hundred reps a day, every day, eventually, you’ll get an offer to play D1 lacrosse. He promised them.

And you know what, that’s exactly what Paul did, getting a full scholarship to play at Johns Hopkins and winning two national championships and All-America honors all four years. But it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. His calling for the game was actually a kind of curse. Because even though it’s one of the oldest sports in history, lacrosse is a fringe sport to say the least, so when Rabil got drafted to the pros first overall, it didn’t mean making millions of dollars, signing big endorsement deals, or playing before huge crowds and national TV audiences the way it does in some professional sports. No, his rookie wage was $6,000 a year. Games were played in small high school and college stadiums, often with just a few dozen fans in the stands. And there were no national TV broadcasts, just the occasional grainy webstream on some little-known site tucked in the corners of the internet.

He was the LeBron James of a sport for which transcendent greatness meant relative obscurity, as it continues to mean for the best lacrosse players in the world.

More recently, ​I had a great conversation with Candace Parker on the Daily Stoic podcast​. She is also one of the greatest to ever play her sport. She played for the University of Tennessee under Pat Summit, where they won two NCAA championships in 2007. In 2008, she was drafted number one overall in the WNBA. She was the Rookie of the Year and the MVP in her first season. She’s won two gold medals and her jersey is being retired this year by two separate teams. Yet, there are far fewer accomplished NBA players—maybe even basketball players who play overseas—that you’ve never heard of that make more money in a season than she did throughout her entire career.

Is that fair? I don’t know if fair is the right word. It’s just what it is. And what it’s always been. Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest athletes of all time, got to choose to be great, but he didn’t get to choose that he was born in 1887. He didn’t get to choose that he lived decades before sports became big business. He didn’t get to choose that professional football players of his time made less than the average college football player makes today.

It isn’t only athletes in less popular sports or from bygone times, of course, who can be world-class yet poorly paid or recognized. The best middle school teachers. The world’s leading experts on this niche topic. The once-in-a-generation talent at that obscure skill. The woman at the daycare I used to send my son to who could put thirty toddlers down for a nap at once, when I struggled to do it with just one. The list could go on and on. There are so many people out there who are utterly extraordinary at what they do, but whose greatness—for one reason or another—doesn’t translate into mass appeal, doesn’t command high compensation, doesn’t receive the recognition it deserves.

I think about this with myself. ​I write books about Stoicism​. If I wrote about something with more mass appeal or if I wrote romance novels or if I ghostwrote celebrity memoirs, maybe I would sell more books, make more money, or be known by more people.

Now, you might say, oh, why don’t you just switch to one of those things? Well, that’s the whole dilemma, right? Paul Rabil and Jim Thorpe could have switched to other professions, maybe. But Candace Parker can’t switch to the NBA. I have written books about other things, but I can tell you, it’s just not what lights me up. It’s not what gets me excited. It’s not what I feel called to try to be great at. Maybe if I had been involved in the design process, I would have chosen to be lit up by something else. But they didn’t consult me. It wasn’t up to me that writing about an obscure school of philosophy is what I find endlessly fascinating.

What is up to me is whether I choose to take it as far as I am capable of taking it.

And this is no small thing. I would actually argue there is a moral imperative to take your talents as far as they can go—irrespective of what the market says about them. After Rabil took his talents as far as they could go—multiple championships and MVP awards, two gold medals with Team USA, 10 All-Star teams, and the all-time record for career points in professional lacrosse—in 2018, he founded the Premier Lacrosse League, a pro league that rivaled and then overtook the 20-year incumbent. The PLL today has a major media rights deal with ESPN, pays its athletes full-time salaries with equity, and includes investors like The Chernin Group, the Raine Group, billionaire Joseph Tsai, NBA star Kevin Durant, and many others.

Because he chose to be great at the thing that had chosen him, Paul has raised the sport’s ceiling so that today’s lacrosse players can take their talents further than was possible when he was playing.

What makes his decision remarkable is that he had been presented with a highly tempting alternative. When Paul was 24, a couple of years into his professional lacrosse career—living with his parents and working a day job—he got a call from New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick.

“I told Paul he could be a strong safety in the NFL,” Belichick writes in the foreword to ​The Way of the Champion​. “I thought he had the size, the speed, and the toughness to play in our league. I had a good sense of his transferable skills because, like him, I grew up playing lacrosse.” Belichick had also had success converting athletes from other sports into great NFL players.

After several conversations, Belichick laid out the options: Paul had the tools to be a pretty good NFL player, and he had the opportunity “to define the pinnacle of a sport.” “Everything worth anything in life comes at a sacrifice,” Belichick said. What did he want to sacrifice? Millions of dollars, perhaps a Super Bowl or two, and the prestige of being an NFL player? Or the call to be one of the greatest lacrosse players of all time? “I would go all in on lacrosse,” Paul writes. “This was my path.”

That’s the choice in front of all of us.

Eventually, we all come to this crossroads—between being pretty good and being great, between what looks impressive from the outside and what lights us up on the inside, between what’s lucrative and what’s calling us.

Where this calling comes from doesn’t matter.

What matters is where we take it.