“You don’t ever achieve greatness. You don’t actually ever become great, because greatness is a journey, not a destination,” says Don Yaeger, an award-winning keynote speaker, business leadership coach, eleven-time New York Times Best-selling author and executive coach. It may seem strange for someone hired by companies to coach leaders on building a culture of greatness to label it as unattainable, but hear him out.
“Greatness is the pursuit of a level of excellence; the object is for it to be and remain unattainable,” he explains. “If you could become great, you would get there and stop. But the truly great ones, the ones I would argue are the best of all time, don’t believe that you ever really arrive, which is what gets them to wake up the next morning and continue to do what most of the rest of us won’t do.”