Greatness Within. A direct response, 10 years later.

Do it because your greatness doesn’t want to be admired. It wants to be freed.

(To be read aloud, with distractions turned downward and your heart turned inward)

Ayutthaya, December 2, 2025. (Exactly 10 years after the original text)

I wrote those words in 2015, when I was 43 years old, still half romantic, half dreamer, after wandering the world with a backpack and a passport full of stamps.

Today, at 53, after 5 years teaching Vedānta, after seeing many students sit before me, after burying friends, and after watching empires rise and fall on Instagram/Facebook/Social Media. After all that, I rewrite the same text, but now without anesthesia.

Every person carries an infinite greatness in their essence.

This remains 100% true.

However, now I complete the sentence I didn’t dare say in 2015: Most people will die without ever opening the box.

Because greatness is not just talent. Greatness is talent + courage + discipline + time.

And here is the equation nobody wants to hear: Greatness = [(Talent – Fear) × (Laziness ÷ Distraction)]

And, in 2025, the formula got worse because the variable “distraction” exploded to levels never before seen in the history of mankind.

Did you know humans now have an average attention span of 8 seconds, while a goldfish has 9?

So yes, you carry an ocean inside you, but you’re so busy liking stories of people who also haven’t opened their own box that the ocean becomes a glass of water you sip while scrolling your feed.

I’ve seen this a thousand times:

• The boy who plays the guitar as if he were born with it, but spends the day playing Free Fire.
• The girl who writes poetry that breaks the soul, but wastes her life making “aesthetic content” for 127 followers.
• The engineer who solves problems no one else can and uses his brilliance to grow a multilevel marketing team.
• The doctor who can heal even with a smile, but spends the day in online poker games.

All of them with infinite greatness screaming inside their souls. And yet, all of them deaf to their own voices.

So, here is the 2025 version, without romanticism:

Stop admiring your greatness in the mirror. Start sweating on top of it.

Because talent without work is just nostalgia for what you could have been. And the clock doesn’t stop. the body ages.

The inner voice that today whispers “you’re special”. Tomorrow, will whisper “you wasted it”.

I have buried friends who were pure greatness, but they died with the music still inside them. Don’t be another one.

So today, right now, in this very second:

• Close the app
• Pick up the instrument, the brush, the book, the code, the paper, whatever it is, and do one hour of deep work on what only you were born to do.

Do it without posting. Without telling anyone. Without waiting for applause.

Do it because your greatness doesn’t want to be admired. It wants to be freed.

And when you finally free it, you will discover the secret I only understood after much study and reflection:

True greatness is not inside you.

You were inside it the whole time, you just needed to stop running away from it.

With brutal affection, Acharya Tadany

Ayutthaya, December 2, 2025

(Exactly 10 years after being naïve enough to believe that it was enough to simply say “you are special”)

Now go work. Greatness has been waiting for ages. And it is not patient.