"Greatness" has a very good publicist.

It shows us the work and accolades and awards. We see the company, the repeatedly broken records, a polished biography, countless publications spanning decades of niche research. We see the Nobel Prize. We see the person who kept going when other people stopped, and it is so tempting to make a clean story of it: to tell ourselves that they wanted something badly enough, worked hard enough, and got it.

That can't be the whole picture, though. There has to be a "messier" side to greatness: what the "greats" had to give up along the way.

I don't mean sacrifice in the motivational sense. Certainly not the sort of sacrifice people mention on podcasts, usually while selling you a daily routine that they swear will change your life. Becoming "great" takes far more from you than your sleep.

Andre Agassi is a useful person to think about here.

From the outside, his career looked complete, nigh-impeccable even. Eight Grand Slams, Olympic gold, recognisably one of the greatest tennis players ever. But in Open, he writes that he hated tennis!

My mind was blown!

It's like if Socrates wrote a book and said he hated thinking!

Agassi had been shaped around tennis very early in life, which is something I've observed in a lot of these "greats". His father trained him relentlessly; his natural aptitude made the path seem obvious. And when you are really good at something, especially if it seems like you were born with that talent, people tend to treat the path as a gift. You can be great at X; why would you want anything else?

This is part of what makes excellence dangerous. One can become very good at something before one has had the chance to decide whether it belongs to one. And one can think one wants a path before one has the experience to see the other side. And by the time you ask the question honestly, there's likely already too much invested in the answer. Your family is proud, your identity is built around this path, and other people need you to keep being the person they have come to recognise.

So you keep going.

I have a lot of friends who are medical doctors and maybe at least 90% of them have said, and still say, that they wish they'd done something else.

I now know that there is a particular loneliness in being admired for something that has stopped feeling like yours. Everyone else sees the result. They admire the result. They want the result for themselves. But they do not see the part of you that has become tired of performing the same gift back to the world.

Something else I've learned is that once a person has been rewarded for being exceptional, ordinary life can start to feel like a demotion. One begins to feel undeserving of rest ("why should I take a break now when X hasn't been achieved?" – which is something I used to tell myself). A quiet weekend indoors can feel like losing ground (another thing I used to tell myself: "I'm going against X incumbent who is well-funded and has a 30-person team; I can't afford to take a break"). Changing course feels strongly like being irresponsible or even unappreciative of your achievements ("I don't really want to practice medicine but I'm already three years into medical school and I can't back out now").

And this is how a pursuit can take more than the hours you give it. It begins to occupy your imagination. You are with people you love, but a part of you is elsewhere. You promise yourself you will be properly present once this project ends, or once the next milestone is reached, or when things settle down.

Steve Jobs is another difficult example.

His work changed how people relate to technology, and inspired millions to pursue technology in a way the world hadn't seen before. I'm not even overstating his impact. His products were influential because he obsessed about details most people dismissed until they'd experienced Apple. He cared not just about how something looked, but also how it felt to hold, and what happened when you opened it for the first time.

He was truly obsessed, another trait I've observed in the "greats".

But his achievements do not make the rest of his life clean.

For years, Jobs denied that Lisa Brennan-Jobs was his daughter. Her memoir, Small Fry, describes a childhood marked by uncertainty and a relationship with her father that could be loving one moment and painful the next. They did have a relationship later, but repair is not the same thing as feeling loved and safe from the beginning.

It would be too easy to say that this was simply the cost of genius, or even greatness.

That kind of language lets successful people off the hook, and because I will be successful I want to be able to hold myself accountable. That kind of language turns choices into fate. It makes neglect sound like the unavoidable shadow cast by important work.

Marc Randolph, co-founder and first CEO of Netflix, took the opposite approach. For over 30 years, Randolph maintained a rule: every Tuesday at 5 pm, he stopped working to spend the evening with his wife. They would have dinner, watch a film, or simply go window-shopping. Meetings, calls, and work emergencies were not allowed to interfere.

If you had something important to discuss with Marc, you'd better have that conversation before 5pm or you'd have to figure out a way to compact your discourse while he walked to his car.

In his LinkedIn post from 2023 , he explained:

“I resolved a long time ago to not be one of those entrepreneurs on their 7th startup and their 7th wife.”

Some things are genuinely hard to balance. Building anything serious will demand your time. There will be seasons where you miss things, where you say no, where your attention is stretched thin. But there is a difference between a demanding season and a life in which everyone close to you is expected to understand your absence forever; or worse, accept your money in exchange for your absence.

Ambition isn't a bad thing. I do not think the answer is to want less from yourself. In fact, the entire point of this blog post is to inspire you to want more, but to expand your aspirations to include more than just your career. There are things genuinely worth becoming excellent at. There are projects worth giving years to. There are opportunities that may ask you to be more disciplined than you thought you could be.

I am now wary of the version of ambition that asks us to treat collateral damage as proof of seriousness. And I am weary of today's hustle culture, for the same reason.

Working until your health collapses is not commitment. Being unavailable to everyone you love is not focus, but maybe it's avoidance. Having no life outside the thing you are trying to win at is not always discipline.

We do this especially with people who have already "made it". We look backwards from the outcome and assume the cost must have been justified because the result was so impressive.

But the people around them remember it differently. The people around you will remember it differently.

I want to be careful here, because I do not think a good life is one with no trade-offs. There is simply no way to pursue anything seriously without giving something else up. The question I want to leave with you is whether you are choosing these costs with your eyes open, or just accepting them because you are afraid to want something that takes effort to preserve. One question I think we should ask ourselves is what the best possible kind of life looks like to us. I think we should ask this question often.

The best kind of life for me should make my life richer. Not just my bank account or my reputation. The best kind of life for me should enrich my ability to love my people and love them well. I should be able to go home. I should be useful without becoming impossible to live with. And I should not be required to commoditise my presence and trade absence for spending sprees.

That is a harder standard for me because I naturally like "work". I am a workaholic. I run to work when I'm stressed (even from work), when I'm anxious, when I'm tired, when I'm confused, when I'm overwhelmed.

Maybe it's the same for you. Maybe it isn't. Either way, eventually the work becomes part of the background. That's the natural progression of success. At least it's been my experience. Wins that once felt enormous gradually fade into past tense and then fade some more. Breakthroughs I once used to define myself now feel like regular Tuesdays, in retrospect.

I now believe that what remains closer to the surface is how it felt to be around you while you were trying to become somebody, and whether the people who loved you had to become smaller so that you could feel great.