Some say you achieve greatness, or excellence, by finding your unique talent and pouring life into it. Malcolm Gladwell’s writes about people who master their talent with 10,000 hours of practice in Outliers.
One talent, sport, pastime, or ability. Gifted people with tones of time.
For the rest of us, excellence is less obvious.
We can all have it, but unique greatness shows up invisibly to us. It grows out of a life of enthusiastic passion poured into a unique combination of interests particular to our individuality.
Consider your interests in quilting and guacamole, or petunias and meteorology: we combine interests unlike anyone else. If you think of more, say porcelain, hydrology, glass blowing and poetry, you should expect very few people in the whole world to be passionate about all of them at once.
If you take a unique mix of ideas and add decades of enthusiastic exploration, you end up a world expert. YOU become a world expert at the unique integration of knowledge that’s been your life’s passion.
You: a World Expert.
We all have the time. We all have interests. The only decision remains whether we will spend our time passionately pursuing all that captures our interest around us.
What’s your expertise? How can you share it?