You don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.
You won’t be great just by sitting there of course, but I suspect great people wouldn’t be as great if they weren’t driven by an urge to achieve greatness to some extent for its own sake.
Great people also like to countersignal how their greatness was never something they had in mind, and that they are just truly dedicated to their art.
— Randall Munroe in today’s xkcd, Marie Curie.
I liked this half-hour talk by Ransom Stephens on the life of Emmy Noether (with a nontechnical explanation of Noether’s theorem).
You won’t be great just by sitting there of course, but I suspect great people wouldn’t be as great if they weren’t driven by an urge to achieve greatness to some extent for its own sake.
Great people also like to countersignal how their greatness was never something they had in mind, and that they are just truly dedicated to their art.
Which relates to this heuristic.