Elevating one’s work to the next plateau is a struggle for those with aspirations of doing great work. The roadmap towards doing great work is driven by three ingredients: focus, courage, and resilience.

Starting with the need to focus, when you think about it the number one barrier to great work is our own inability to maintain any focus for any extended period of time. If you have ever tried to get into a disciplined activity that requires intense focus such as meditation then can directly relate. Practising this focus in tremendously difficult because of the amount of concentration and setting needed to remove all nonessential influences that detract from meditative focus. Being great at one’s work is not indifferent than this reality. Unless you stay focused on doing work with laser beam objective in mind it becomes almost impossible to achieve. The day to day distractions are overwhelming barriers to any successful great work. As such, a big part of doing great work is having the relentless discipline of time management to remove all barriers, bureaucracy and distractions that get in the way of the work.

Courage is the second ingredient of doing great work which means having the audacity to be bold and try new ideas. One’s determination to seek out ideas that are risky, by pushing to the edges of the boundaries is the only true path to doing great work. Mediocre work occurs in the middle but it is the geniuses that work at the edges. It takes great courage to struggle towards the edges. One has to be prepared to deflect criticism, naysayers and those in the middle that are fearful of being exposed as just ok. But take heart that courage to take risks and put oneself out there is necessary for greatness.

The last point is resilience. I look to great literary figures like Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald who believed firmly that no matter what condition they were in, no matter how they were feeling it was essential that they write a set amount every day. They had a goal of how many words to write each and every day, regardless of whether the work was crap or brilliant. None of that mattered because they knew great work requires the fortitude to grind through the difficult thought process that are discouraging. A genius is never satisfied in this regard, they know that being great is a fight to get past these barriers. You cannot commit to being great unless you are committed to this struggle every day, anyone who states that their ideas or brilliance is effortless is nothing short of a liar or an anomaly savant.

So there you have it, great work is the genesis of focus, courage and resilience coming together. Without these elements working in harmony with each other, great work remains the rare air accessible only to those that have unlocked this formula.

Editors note: Focus, Courage and Resilience concepts are drawn from a fantastic new book called Do More Great Work by Michael Bungay Steiner available on Amazon

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