An Unassuming Path to Greatness

BY PARISA ROSE

What is greatness? Someone with greatness is set apart from the rest, has established excellence, and is looked up to with eminence in his field. The storied greats throughout history have become woven into the culture because we love to revel in their journeys to victory while gleaning inspiration from their triumphs.

After investing 14 years as an athlete in the sport of swimming to become a national champion, complete an NCAA Division 1 career, and garner 8 AllAmerican titles, I can attest confidently that my experiences produced some invaluable learnings.

When greatness is discussed, people often emphasize the fixed mindsets, motivation, hustle, skill mastery, and sacrifice it requires. While these are all absolutely relevant, the concept of greatness can be deconstructed to reveal more bang for your buck.

Achieving personal greatness definitely requires immense dedication, and while reflecting on my own journey, I believe we work against ourselves in many unassuming ways. I have found these ways residing comfortably within the nuances of the mundane. So, grab a flashlight and come with me while we shine a light to turn the unassuming into the obvious.

Have you ever thought about what greatness looks like on a regular Tuesday? Not championship qualifying or record-setting, but a regular Tuesday that involves endless emails, traffic, and the dinner that you still haven’t figured out yet. Greatness requires us to hold a spirit of anticipation and appreciation for the mundane.

Greatness on those Tuesdays looks like choosing to hold within yourself a spirit of anticipation as you scan each email, maneuver through traffic at each congested intersection, and prep ingredients to make a stir-fry dish while standing at your kitchen counter.

It’s simple - you choose to anticipate the goodness in that specific moment, regardless of how it may uniquely appear. When you anticipate the goodness in a given moment and do that repeatedly, it develops your ability to hold a spirit of anticipation for the mundane.

An appreciation for the mundane comes from believing there is value in each repetition. It’s when you allow yourself to connect with the idea that continuing to show up and executing each rep is ultimately an expression of respect for yourself.

This approach stacks a repetition-based valueadding mindset with selfrespect. You can insert more bang for your buck there. It’s easy to forget that it required Steph Curry to complete thousands of reps by scoring the same shot before his greatness could be enjoyed live on ESPN.

Another unassuming place resides in mindless scrolling on our preferred social media platforms. I’m not going to tell you to get rid of them but rather entertain a proactive approach of intentional curation.

Now, slow down with me and imagine everything you see is speaking to and feeding your mind. Answering honestly, would you want to feast on what you currently see?

When we choose not to be proactive, we default into constantly protecting and defending the state of our mind. An exercise I love, both simple and effective, involves creating digital dream boards. You can do this by intentionally designing your personal feed on each social platform, turning mindless scrolling into vision casting.

This will bring intentionality into each account you choose to follow and the ability to position content that affirms your greatness. By curating what you passively intake, you position yourself to be empowered over and over and over again because we both know how many times you open Instagram and TikTok daily.

Remember to bring your flashlight because we’re definitely going to need it for this last one. We’re essentially addressing patterns and people as we explore the last unassuming place.

By patterns, I mean taking an honest look at your physical environment because it’s actually telling the bigger story of what narratives are running through your mind. Because in my world, efficiency holds its weight in gold, let’s dive straight into illuminating an environment that will work for you, not against you.

Identifying how you tend to your closets, cabinets, drawers, and other storage spaces shows you how open you are toward change. Do they show as cluttered, disorganized, or jampacked? These tendencies are important to acknowledge because they are old patterns with new excuses we’ve assigned to them, and we end up carrying them into every regular Tuesday.

Marshall Goldsmith said, “After living with their dysfunctional behavior for so many years, people became invested in defending their dysfunctions rather than changing them.” The moral of the story is by clearing the clutter, you eliminate the opportunity for your dysfunction to get cozy.

Now that we’ve gone through the effort of deconstructing greatness, we must also bring to light the necessity for creating space for that greatness to call home.

One way to create space is to identify the relationships that have reached completion in your life, then release them. These relationships are the ones that continue to be a drain on our time, energy, and other resources.

I have found this practice to be deeply honoring to both myself and the other person. Not all people are intended to go into the next season of life with us, and that’s okay. Not all people move with us in the same capacity or with the same access to our mental and emotional conditions.

Identifying and releasing these completed relationships really allows us to step into the next level of autonomy by choosing to honor our own greatness. While these decisions are challenging, they allow radical shifts to happen because we now have the space to receive and the bandwidth to step into what is already on the way. We now embody our readiness and therefore become the home of our greatness.

Mastering and curating the mundane helps us to navigate with excellence every regular Tuesday to come, and decluttering the mundane creates the space, so our greatness has a place to land.

The bottom line is we get to show up for ourselves in greater ways than we ever have. We each get to confront the dysfunctional parts that don’t support the progress, contribution, and greatness assigned to us. Facing our own dysfunction also becomes tremendously supportive when we’re experiencing a traumatic Thursday or grieving Sunday.

We cannot experience our greatness without a foundation of self-respect, personal autonomy, and an honest evaluation of the effectiveness of our mundane. So go ahead and brighten the lights, turn up the volume and BE the greatness you are already.

About the author:

Parisa Rose is an 8-time All-American National Champion and Human Rights Activist. She is also an NCAA D1 Athlete, holding more than 20 swim records in the US, with some having stood for over 20 years.

Of Iranian-American descent, Parisa used her life experiences to help women move past their traumas and reframe how they view them. She was recently recognized as an icon for her activism for Iran and continues to produce content that drives many to reimagine a greater world.