They are not many. There is one Phœnix in the whole world, one great general, one perfect orator, one true philosopher in a century... Many have claimed the title 'Great,' like Cæsar and Alexander, but in vain, for without great deeds the title is a mere breath of air.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Genuine eminence is far rarer than the word "great" suggests, because it demands a completeness that almost no one reaches, and the higher the field, the harder its top rank is to occupy. The practical use is calibration. If you treat every senior figure, every famous name, every confident performer as great, you have no scale left for the actual article, and you will overvalue the merely successful and undervalue the truly rare. Know the real great ones of your field, study what completeness looks like, and measure everyone else, including yourself, against that rather than against the inflated local standard. The title without the deeds is a breath of air, and learning to hear the difference is what keeps your judgment honest.
Practice
- Study the genuinely great in your field deeply enough to know what completeness looks like; that becomes your true measuring stick (maxim 75 emulates them).
- Calibrate your praise; if everyone is "great," the word is spent, and you have lost the scale that spots the real thing.
- Separate the title from the deeds when assessing anyone senior; ask what they have actually done, not what they are called.
Use this when
- Use this assessing reputations and choosing whom to genuinely learn from; the rare great are worth more study than a crowd of the merely titled.
- Use it on yourself as a standard; measuring against the real great keeps you honestly sized (maxim 89's mirror).
Ignore this when
- Don't let calibration become contempt for the good-but-not-great; most useful people are not phoenixes, and that is fine (maxim 195 appreciates all).
- Don't withhold genuine recognition; the point is accuracy, not stinginess with praise that is earned.
A picture of it
A young analyst joins a firm where every partner is spoken of as brilliant, and for a year he takes the local inflation at face value, unable to tell the genuinely exceptional from the merely senior. Then he reads deeply in his field's real masters and returns with a working scale. Now he can see that two of the partners are the real thing and the rest are competent people wearing a large word. The calibration changes where he invests his attention, toward the two worth learning from, and away from the confident many whose title was a breath of air.
Keep the word "great" expensive. Spend it only where the deeds have earned it, and your judgment stays worth something.