By Ted Zimnicki, NSCA, Z-Health, FST

What does greatness look like? What does a great person do that “normal” people don’t?

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of books on this, and there is no way that I’ll be able to get to the full answer in this little article. I encourage you to read further and dig deep. Go to the library and support your local bookstores.

The most important piece of the puzzle is community. No one becomes great on their own. There is a myth in culture of the great and lonely person who climbs to the top through the force of their own grit and hardwork. This exists in many cultures, but I’ve been living in American culture for so long that I feel like I can really only speak from that limited perspective. All the heroes I think about are lone warriors who overcame immeasurable odds to become victorious! Or - at least that is the story they’d like to tell us.

What is really so often the case is that these heroes of legend and also of history are surrounded by people who create the circumstances that enable them to become heroes. (That may have been the most complicated sentence I’ve ever written.) Let’s unpack that. Let’s look at a famous American hero, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He, of course, was a great person who fought tremendous odds against something unjust. He was one of the leading voices in the American Civil Rights Movement: he inspired a nation to act, and the effects of his work are undeniable.

Everyone remembers Dr. King, but not everyone remembers the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) or its less prominent members. However, I’d argue that Dr. King would not have been even successful at all were it not for the people with whom he surrounded himself. He knew how difficult the road ahead might be, so he made sure he had people around him to share the load. People like Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and Ralph Abernathy were all key to the Civil Rights Movement, right alongside Dr. King.

What does this have to do with getting good at something? It illustrates the point that you are only as good at the team around you. No one makes it on their own. The lone person will never get as far as someone with a good team. And the good team will never make it as far as a great team.

Another way to put this sentiment that really resonates with me: You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

Think about those five people. Who are they? What function do they serve in your life? When you think about those people, it doesn’t just mean in physical space. Include the time you spend inside your own head. Who do you spend the most time thinking about? Time that you spend thinking about something that someone did or said is every bit as valuable as time spent face to face.

Now that you have five people in your mind: average all of their skills, hobbies, abilities, attributes, and outlooks. Do all of those things create a set of values and ideals that you want in your own life? If the answer is “no,” you’ve got some hard choices to make and probably some even harder conversations to have.

Your community can be your biggest strength or your greatest weakness. I do my best to surround myself with people who are better than I am. If I find a quality in someone that I want in myself, I do my best to spend time with that person. Eventually, that quality will rub off and I’ll find that I’ve improved. The reverse is also true. If I regularly find myself in a toxic environment, I’ll start thinking negatively and be less driven.

What happens when we find ourselves surrounded by negativity? When we find ourselves in an environment that doesn’t give us any role models, doesn’t encourage us to grow, and leaves us needing a half hour-long bitching session before we can feel normal again? There will always be those days, and there is nothing that we can do about it. But we can still grow from those experiences. If you are aware when going into these environments, or if a usually positive environment isn’t positive on a given day, it can still allow you to grow. It is just as valuable to learn what NOT to do.

I have been a part of an organization where the leader was seen as totally incompetent by most of the members. Every meeting we had was painful; it got to the point where I started to dread those meetings. Honestly, while I was there I never found a way to make the best of it and the whole thing felt like a waste of time. But in retrospect, I could have used that opportunity to learn what not to do. Every interaction is a learning opportunity, if you let it be