Choose Goodness Over Greatness

"Do not sacrifice goodness for greatness."

Every now and then you hear a great and profound statement that inspires you. I heard this one today during a PhD seminar session on teaching and learning. Though I have likely heard something similar to this in the past, it stuck with me for some reason today.

Some may immediately be thinking of a leadership/business model approach to these terms and wondering, why would we ever want to be good at something when we could be great at it?! Isn't the purpose of our daily struggles to be making constant and consistent improvement upon ourselves and the quality of our achievements?

Allow me to define our terms here in a different light for the sake of understanding the full meaning of the statement.

We often think of goodness in a progressive or comparative sense, as in something can be good, better, or the best. In this context, however, we are thinking of goodness as a value, as in virtuousness or righteousness. It is this meaning that makes this statement effective.

Though we strive for excellence and greatness in our professional lives, we cannot do so at the sacrifice of the pursuit of moral goodness. There's a great quote from John Eldridge on this that I wrote down a while ago.

"Choose the path of humility; don't be a self-promoter, a glad-hander, a poser. Climb down the ladder; . . . look to be the servant of all."

In other words, don't pursue being great at the sacrifice of being good. This is the polar opposite of what successful business men tell us. "To be a success in business, one is simply forced to do things which are hard on others." In other words, you have to sacrifice goodness for greatness.

This is unacceptable for the true, believing follower of Jesus. Our professional habits cannot be divorced from our values. In the end, we will not hear, "Well done" from the Master if we pursued greatness and abandoned goodness.

Matthew 7:18-20: "A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits."