Ethan E. Rocke

All of this changes, however, if we make a simple switch: If instead of thinking of greatness as a definition, we were to think of it — first and foremost — as a feeling we experience when we sense something. And if we stay with this switch, the ability to evoke this feeling in others would be the truest and purest measure of greatness. Rather than using history, or legacy, or praise, or external validation as measuring sticks — all things that can be manipulated with different forms of excess — we did the exact opposite: measure greatness not by what is present but by what is absent and what that absence says about everything that remains when the excess is stripped away.

If this is still a little abstract, let’s make it more concrete: Life is ultimately a single-player game, but the only thing that truly makes it worth living has something to do with our relationships to other people, and this paradox sits at the core what it means to be a human being.