Hallmark of A Great Individual

It was only yesterday night that I was in Hari Ramulu's class and once again, he has made me think hard. What really triggered such a thought? When Hari started comparing the CGPAs of two different individuals (they have very high CGPAs), I started thinking of what really makes great people great? So I kind of came up with this short list of what really makes us great

1. Cognitive capacity (Intelligence)

Well, needless to say, we always relate the greatness of people to intelligence. I have to say that this belief is partially true and partially false. I think the reason for saying this is very simple isn't it? There are many things in life that can be misused and intelligence is one of them. Otherwise, you wouldn't be seeing hackers who hack into servers and destroy files (not all hackers are bad). However, I wouldn't go far enough to say that people with average cognitive capacity to be mediocre in their lives. There are people with average cognitive capacity doing great things as well. Although it is evident that not all of us are born with the same cognitive capacity, nurture also play a very important part of the development of the cognitive capacity. I believe that sound cognitive capacity is not a pre-requisite, but an advantageous trait to have in order to become a great individual

2. Emotional Control

I have to say that being emotional is something that only makes us human. I feel that some of you might argue that:

Without emotions, we'll be less of a human. Being a human is all about having emotions. If a dog can show emotions, why not humans? If a human can't show emotions, it only means that he's even worse than a dog

In my honest opinion, there are many times that emotions will take the driver's seat in our mind and we do things that turn out to be irrational. I have personally been through such situations where emotions took control of me and I ended up making decisions that I regret. I have been lucky at times when the mistake didn't cost me that much but there are times when such mistakes did quite a severe blow to me. All these are pretty much based on my personal experience where there was poor upholding of my discipline.

* this does not apply to people to are involved in fields that are related to emotions like arts. I agree that there are many artists that make a living with their emotional expression and I truly respect these great artists *

3. Spirituality

For a person to identify and answer his higher calling, he must be in touch with his spiritual side. What is spiritual? Spiritual means of or pertaining to the spirit or soul, as distinguished from the physical nature. Essentially, to be able to identify and answer the higher calling means that that person is able to add value to his life by having a purpose in life. By having a more fruitful, purposeful and meaningful life, everyday seems to be so colourful. A person will have the determination to accomplish what he set out to do everyday simply because he is answering his calling, a greater and stronger reason to accomplish what he wants to accomplish

Having highlighted three hallmarks of a great individuals, I must admit that this is an incomplete list of all hallmarks of what makes an individual great. There is no definition of what constitutes a great individual because the scope is just too wide for me to cover in its entirety. Greatness is something that I don't know how to gauge. If you have any of your own opinions to add, I'll be very happy to share my views :D

* this post is only an opinion of the writer and should never be treated as a fact *