“Good is the Enemy of Great”
There is a big difference between NOT KNOWING SOMETHING and KNOWING IT. It might look very simple but THERE IS such kind of phenomenon in our life. It is so simple that some who already known might think that the people who do not know are so ignorance or very unintelligent. Because of its fundamentally important state, these two conditions might bring huge gap between the two sides.
I assume many people know Baseball, a very famous ball-hitting-and-running sports in many countries. However, many people do not know about it. Not only not knowing how to play, some might even do not know what kind of sport (or even what in the world) Baseball is. When coming to South Korea or USA, where Baseball is very famous, people who know about Baseball will have many advantages in making new friends or in finding good topics during dinner.
Moreover, the KNOWING SOMETHING and KNOWING HOW TO DO things are two different matters. In case of Baseball, there might be millions of people knowing what and how baseball looks like, but I believe there are less who know how to play it (personally, I belong to this group). In conversation, perhaps you could start talking with new friends, but knowing only a little will not bring much advantage: you might end up talking about baseball and naming some famous players, but you could not come up with more interesting side of Baseball talking.
Knowing HOW TO DO things and DOING things will also separate the gap between people even larger. Continuing to talk about baseball, the group of people who fall into this group will significantly lower, much lower. Housewives, high school students, teenagers, merchants, or even CEOs would probably know a lot about how to play Baseball, but those who really sweat with it are not many.
Going further, those who DO SOMETHING and DO SOMETHING WELL are two different types of groups. Many kids might be playing baseball in school yards, some teenagers could possibly play baseball in the neighborhood park, or several workers would probably spend the week ends playing baseball together. However, their level of playing is surely different with those who sweat everyday and live with baseball: the professional baseball players.
Among those who DO SOMETHING WELL, there are few people who DO REALLY WELL (GREATLY). In the baseball world, many players are considered well, at least those who play in professional leagues in their respective countries can be considered into this category. However, doing something well is not enough. They are still going to lose to those who do it greatly. Folks like Alex Rodriguez, Jim Thome and Todd Helton are away different compared to university baseball team members.
Even for the group of people who DO REALLY WELL, there are still some who stand out to be LEGENDARY: those group of people who work extraordinarily hard, be given with some talents, have been overcoming many obstacles, do not give up on their way, and set their own standard in life. Figures like Babe Ruth in the world of baseball is just legendary, too hard to beat (his record) and probably the best baseball player ever born.
Babe Ruth (1st on all-time slugging % with 0.690; 1st on all-time OPS with 1.164; 1st on all-time OPS+ with 206)
Who Are We?
The moral of the story is: no matter what you do, do it greatly; don’t be easily satisfied with our current of state in doing things; set our own standard and working hard for that. We might be sitting in the same classrooms, listening to identical teachers, reading similar books, and doing equal home works; however, everybody knows that by the end of the semester, we will end up in very different points. Some students might understand everything the the class give them, several students probably are too lazy to study so that end up knowing nothing about the class, and few GREAT students possibly apply many of the lessons in their real life and/or even learning from extra sources to boost up their competence and understanding.
Sometime if we feel that we are good enough, we are being to proud and kind of lazy to move up. That’s when the disaster begins: time when we settle up with the GOOD and leave out the chance to be GREAT.
As the old saying by Jim Collins says, “Good is the Enemy of Great,” let’s keep up our struggle and hard work to be better person. We might not be able ending us as legend, but we are surely becoming better persons and therefore are more worthwhile to our community.
It’s really great story…it really touched me.
Thank you very much^^
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