It’s been just about a year since I presented “You’re Not That Great: A Motivational Speech” at TEDx Huntsville. Since that time, I have been amazed with the response to this simple message and the fervor with which people have shared it with their friends and loved ones. TED events are famously stingy with time in an effort to keep the messages intense and focused. Given that I had much more to say about the seven pillars mentioned in the talk, I decided to write a book! “You’re Not That Great” the book will deepen your understanding of the seven principles covered in the talk all while maintaining the simultaneously academic and lighthearted tone of the original. If you watch the video above and find that your interest is piqued, I’d invite you to read the book. Writing this short work has been humbling and exciting and I’m enormously grateful to all who have taken the time to help me refine my thinking around what it takes to be great. I’ll leave you with two quotes from the book and wish you happy reading:
“Consider the most meaningful thing you have ever done. I would wager it took a measure of risk, uncertainty and hard work to achieve. In this, as with all risk, comes a valuable lesson: to strive for certainty is to doom oneself to mediocrity. Consider the person who remains unattached to avoid risking heartache and finds loneliness in the process. Or the would-be entrepreneur who never makes the leap of faith and wastes a career working at jobs she hates. The irony of obsessive loss aversion is that our worst fears become realized in our attempts to manage them.”
“I think that true personal greatness is made. I think that there is a leader within each of us, and that we can all be great in our own sphere. I also think that we can choose to be lazy, bigoted, hateful, and thwart our growth through our own indifference. That we are capable of both great leadership and great waste is what makes choosing to be great so very special.”
- Daniel Crosby