DON'T BE DECEIVED; YOU'RE NOT BORN TO BE GREAT

“Champions are not made in the ring, they are not born; they are made in the gym”

It does not matter the number of motivational books you’ve read, you could as well have been told by your prophet that you are bound or even ‘cursed’ to be great, what matters is that you’re about to get the truth here today. I won’t have you deceived, not necessarily because I like you so much (I don’t even know you) but because I owe it to posterity to tell my readers the truth always. You might want to say that the truth itself is subjective but I dare say that you’ll be convinced this is the truth by the time you make it to the last word in this cluster of words some call article.
So, what makes you great? 

Is greatness inherited? Are people born great? Well, greatness is not inherited, material things are. People are not born great. You are not born great, but you can achieve greatness!
Greatness is achieved, though some people are thrust closer to greatness by virtue of family background or location, greatness depends on the individual. In other words, in as much as greatness can be influenced by certain factors such as background (some are born into successful homes), location, favourable economic conditions among others, a person’s greatness is a function of his decisions, what he does! This is so because we’ve seen cases of people inheriting enormous wealth and winding up later in life as paupers. Is this to say that I’m judging greatness by monetary means? Far from it, that’s just an illustration.
We can judge if you’ll be great or wind up a mediocre or worse by the things you do daily. Greatness is not by desire or envisioning, wishful thinking or dreaming, it is by action. What you do daily constitute your habits, your habits come together to form your character; your character is you. Successful people have habits which define them and so do people who turn out as failures.
Great people understand timing and sacrifice and this is visible in their daily routine. Mohammed Ali once said, “I don’t count the push ups when I start, I start counting when it starts to hurt because that is when it really counts”. I need not do a citation of the famous boxer here, but the message is quite clear. You so much desire greatness but what do you spend your time doing every day? You want to be a great writer but how many books have you read? You want to be a great business man or woman but how do you spend your pocket money? Can you name five successful business men?
The truth remains that, you can tell a man’s tomorrow by his actions of today. Greatness is achieved. Your beliefs don’t make you a better person, your actions do. You believe you’re great, you believe you can be the best, fine. But what are you doing to make sure you end up as the best, what are you doing to be great?
Most people desire greatness but are not ready to pay the price to be great. There’s no formula for greatness but you can tell from your actions if you’re headed for greatness or something else. And your family background doesn’t matter. Your parents could be successful but that is no guarantee that you’ll be successful yourself. That might even turn out to be your own doom because you might end up becoming too drowned in your parents’ success to see beyond your nose, to see the need for you to become something for yourself.
If you ever notice that your actions are not at par with the future you have in mind, you can always mend your ways. Someone once said, you can’t keep on doing the same things and expect different results. Your actions define you!