The Cost of Greatness

I can’t tell you how bad I want it. Some days I wake up aflame. There is electricity crackling down my knuckles, an urgent rhythm pounded into the keys as I type. A river of creation flows out of me as I revel in the act of making. Other days, I mostly eat pretzels. I meander from task to task, completely content with being dead center of the bell curve. 

I can’t even tell you what “it” is. Some days I want to be the tech writer. Matt Levine will tremble. Ben Thompson’s email list will be torn asunder. I will be read and admired and praised. Other days I wake up disgusted by what yesterday’s Evan did. 

Why did I write till 1 in the morning rather than spending time with my wife? I want to be great, yes, but I also want to be a great husband and son. There is a reason why lots of creatives struggle with addiction, or why many investors I know are on their third spouse. Money and power never come cheap. The only great I should want is a great life. 

Perhaps you have felt similar confusion. You also want to be great. (Hopefully you’re saner than me and want to be great at something other than writing.) But still, you listen to that siren song of more. 

As life forces priorities to shift, so does your personal definition of what constitutes great. There is a tension; the longer you remain committed to a single cause of greatness, the more incapable you become of being good enough at everything else.

This terrible cost is most obvious in the people who have ascended to the heights of our society. The HBO series Succession, which recently ended, showed it beautifully—for those unfamiliar, it follows Logan Roy and his four kids as they jockey to inherit the multibillion-dollar media empire Logan created. 

(Beware, spoilers ahead.)

For me, the climax of the series is the penultimate episode—the funeral of Logan Roy. There, each of the children wrestle with their grief. The youngest son, Roman, collapses mid-eulogy with remorse. The eldest son, Connor, gets sidelined as he has been his whole life. But Kendall, the heir apparent, gives a speech that, my oh my, did something to me. Kendall was abused, degraded, and humiliated by his father. Logan beat Roman, committed Connor’s mother to an asylum, was misogynistic toward his daughter, Shiv, and was generally an evil, vile man. Despite all that, the company he built was great. In the eulogy he gives, Kendall grapples with his father’s legacy: