How to become the greatest

Your coming to this website, your reading of the posts that are made available here, signifies something. You want to be great. Maybe you want to be a great blogger. Maybe you want to be a great Twitterer (Tweeter?). Maybe you want to be “the Social Media greatest.”

What is “greatness?”

How do you define greatness? You’ve probably seen all kinds of definitions of greatness floating around in the Social Media space. Some of those definitions are:

- “I want to be the next xxx”

- “I want to have x number of Twitter followers”

- “I want to average x number of comments on my blog posts”

- Or more recently, “I want to have Klout clout”

All of these answers may be spot on or completely off the mark. It just depends on who you are and, more importantly, what you want to achieve. However, I would point out one often overlooked fact.  While we are all striving for greatness, whatever that may be to us, we are all already doing something that I think is pretty great. Think about it. If you are blogging, you are:

• Sharing your writing in public
• Opening yourself up to potential debates or (hopefully not) the occasional insult
• Competing for attention in a highly competitive arena

If you are using Twitter, you are:

• Compressing complex thoughts into 140 characters (or less most of the time)
• Aggressively putting yourself out there to meet new people
• Sharing your ideas and opinions with people you have never met

Overcoming the inertia that one can meet when just getting started on the Social Media journey is achieving greatness. Even if your stats may not be what you want right now, even if you have not surpassed this or that person, you have achieved greatness in my book for trying and enduring. Striving for greatness beyond that takes us all into the stratosphere.

Who can tell us we’re great?

It’s entirely possible that after reading that last paragraph, you are rolling your eyes a little. After all, it’s all well and good to be a dandelion growing through cement, but that doesn’t pay the bills, right? Fair enough. Let’s say that greatness is something far more complex and engaging than just a state of being and participation. Can we tell ourselves that we have achieved greatness, or must that come from someone outside looking in?

A lot of people place the value of their Social Media worthiness into the hands of the “cool kids,” the “superstars,” the “influencers,” …whatever you want to call that cream of the crop group of people. Greatness, for these people, would look like a retweet from one of those people, or a book review from one of those people. A lot of people look at the influencers as if the influencers are the guards for the doors to success, and only they can determine who may enter.

Is this what Blog or Twitter greatness is all about?

Your Greatness Is Yours to Define And Protect

If you do Social Media and you want to achieve greatness, there has to be one factor about which you are selfish, protective, and as egotistical as they come. That factor is a definition of your success.

Why do you have to define when you have become “great?” Only you truly live in  your head. Only you really know what you are after.  Only you know the obstacles you have overcome to get where you are, and only you can really know what obstacles still lie in your path. You can’t let anyone else tell you that what you’re using is a bad metric for success. It’s your success. It’s your greatness.

So how do you achieve greatness in Social Media? How do you become a “blog great” or a “Twitter great?” Ask yourself what that would look like to you. Where would you be? What would you have accomplished? Determine that. Hold that in your mind. Then determine how you can get there. Don’t stop when someone else says you’ve reached greatness, and don’t stop when someone has said you’ve failed.

What does greatness look like to you? How are you going to become the greatest?