Greatness: 4 Rules and 8 Categories

The point

What is greatness supposed to look like, and what path do you need to take? Give yourself permission to start walking down the path to your greatness in as many categories as you can pursue.

Jay Abraham · Two Day Rapid-Result "Instant Immersion" — Day 1 Cued to 47:09 6 min 41 sec loading…

Why it matters

You were programmed in your DNA to perform at optimum capacity. Every human being inherently wants to be great. The dissatisfaction under an otherwise successful life has one cause — you were allowed to operate in a world of mediocrity, and nobody named it as a choice. Four rules carry you off it. Rule one, see it. Ask what greatness looks like and the honest answer is usually a word, not a picture. You want a clear-cut, three-dimensional view of how it looks and feels from every vantage point, in every application of your life. Greatness is relative, so it is never somebody else's summit borrowed and enlarged. It is what is already in you, seen clearly enough to walk toward. Rule two, take the path highest and best for you, not the highest available. Many paths reach the same outcome, and one is faster, safer and more fulfilling — a different one for each person. A pole vaulter sets the bar high enough to stretch, never so high it stops the jump. Rule three, give yourself permission. Start walking, in as many arenas as you can carry, never all at once, because that only diffuses you. Rule four, secure one advocate already up the mountain. Preeminent, extraordinarily hopeful for you, willing to intervene and pull you back on track, they champion you until momentum takes over. And the summit was never the whole of it: leave better off anyone you spend any length of time with.

The mistake almost everyone makes

You borrow somebody else's picture of greatness and set the bar at the height they already reached, not the one that would stretch you. When you miss it you read the stall as proof you were not built for greatness, and stop jumping altogether.

The test: Describe your greatness out loud for 60 seconds without naming another person or company. If you cannot fill the minute, you are chasing a comparison, not a picture.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

Who	What happened
On Holding	On held one picture — running on clouds — and engineered toward it until that sensation commanded about 60% gross margin and 2.3 billion Swiss francs.
Vital Farms	Vital Farms made the egg carton a moral object, humane and traceable, and revenue reached about $606 million with net income more than doubled.
YETI	YETI raised its bar until durability signaled seriousness, turning a commodity cooler into an identity badge and escaping the commodity trap at premium prices.
e.l.f. Beauty	e.l.f. gave itself permission to make low price a badge rather than an apology, running 25 straight quarters of growth to roughly $1.3 billion.
Oz Hair & Beauty	Two sons took their father's Sydney salon online, then into towns the chains ignored — 30-plus stores in three years, $100 million a year.
PRAN-RFL Group	PRAN-RFL left its farmers better off with a guaranteed price, locked up supply, and pushed the processed output into exports worth 10 billion taka.
Pal's Sudden Service	Pal's championed its staff with daily training; its Baldrige profile records turnover falling from nearly 200 percent in 1995 to 127 percent by 2000.
Paragon Corp (maker of Wardah)	Paragon built halal-certified cosmetics for Muslim women the multinationals ignored, and revenues today run roughly 400 times their level at the century's start.

What it solves

The words a business owner uses for this before anybody has told them the name of it. If one of these is a sentence you have said out loud, this is your strategy.

Successful and still unsatisfied“By every measure the business is doing fine, and I cannot shake the feeling that this is not what I was for.”The one cause named plainly — a life you were permitted to run at mediocrity — and the four steps that carry you off it.
I cannot picture what great looks like“If you asked me to describe what greatness would look like for me specifically, I would have nothing to say.”A clear-cut, three-dimensional picture of your own greatness, seen and felt from every vantage point, before a single step gets chosen.
The bar is so high i stopped jumping“I set an enormous goal, got nowhere near it, and quietly stopped reaching for anything at all.”The path that is highest and best for you rather than the highest one available — high enough to stretch you, never so high it stops the jump.
I am waiting for permission“I keep waiting for something to happen that makes it acceptable for me to go after this.”The permission nobody else will issue, given by you, and pursued across the arenas of your life without being spread so thin it diffuses you.
There is nobody in my corner“There is not one person who would step in, tell me I am off track, and pull me back onto it.”What an advocate is for, who qualifies — preeminent, already up the mountain, extraordinarily hopeful for you — and how far their momentum carries you.
The advisor's version“I spend every day pushing clients toward their potential and I have never once written down my own.”The advocate role described from the inside, and the same four steps turned on your own practice so you have walked what you sell.

The challenge

Score the six arenas, then move on the widest gap.

Write the arenas down one column — friend, husband or wife, parent, value creation, marketing communication, appreciation for others. Score each 1 to 10 where you stand today. Beside the score, write what greatness in that arena would look and feel like, specific enough that somebody else could recognize it. Take the widest gap and write the next rung on that path — high enough to stretch you, low enough that you will actually jump it this month. Name one person already at that summit and ask them for 30 minutes within seven days.

How you will know it is done Every arena carries a score and a written picture, the widest gap has its next rung named, and the ask has gone out.

The AI layer · second pass

Once this is working, here is what to multiply

Improve the system first. Then multiply it. This panel is the second run at the strategy above, and it is deliberately useless until the first run is done.

Before you point anything at this You have written the picture of your own greatness, and scored your gap in each category.

What it multiplies Tracking, across a year, which of the eight categories you closed and which you quietly stopped mentioning, then finding the people already standing where you said you were going.

The trap Generating an inspiring picture of greatness on your behalf, which is the part that had to come from inside you. A borrowed summit is somebody else's, and the machine will describe it beautifully enough that you never notice it is not yours.