What contributes to lasting renown?

In response to yesterday's "Tokugawa’s Generals, and Being a Great Follower," I wrote that greatness is something you define for yourself. I asked, what's your definition of greatness, then? We can think about it. The reader clarified -

I wrote down a list of great men and realized what I meant by greatness. Glory, recognition by other human beings. From conquerors, to musical virtuosos, the great men are those that are supported by the wave of existing people. Great men are those who did something that is today recognized as valuable. Great men are those that are known by "everyone". That is how I think fame should be seen. That is how I am seeing it as of now.

Something that jumps to the eyes is that it requires other people. If you are great then at least someone must be not great. I guess being successful in life is different from being great. If living a successful life is minimally having 2 kids with more opportunities than you had and a strong family then once achieved, your are successful. Greatness I think could be seen as recognized success. Perhaps self-recognized success can make you see yourself as great...

If everyone is successful and recognize that their success and others are great, then everyone is great, hence no one is great. (or otherwise said, to my belief, the word "great" loses value as "awe-some" did) Well that is how I see it. Everyone is successful in something, not all are The Great. Where were the risk-taking warriors? As I now understand, they were fearful. Then again I suppose they had to stop someday throne or no throne. Having acquired the belief that to rebel is a bad ROI.

Days Twenty And Twenty-One: Untracked

I didn't track Days Twenty or Twenty-One. On these days, I did a few valuable things and got in approximately 5 hours of very high-level creative work onto sales and marketing (almost by accident), and went to the gym once. But the days were very flawed.

Short answer is I was gearing up on Day Twenty for a big day, had my morning rituals in order, and took modafinil. Now, I've written about modafinil before -- it makes you really concentrate intensely. It's great when producing, but if you get off-track while on it, you can get really off-track.

So I took modafinil, and then made a gigantic mistake -- I checked my email.

And my email was particularly ugly that morning. You know the like "oh man, that's a pretty significant pain-in-the-ass emails" that you get a couple times a month? Well, I had like 3-5 of them sitting on top of my inbox. From my lawyer in Hong Kong (bad news), my landlord (rejecting me trying to extend a lease on reasonable terms, he wants something crazy and isn't really in touch with the property market here), a couple mails from clients, and an actually very solid opportunity but one that's pretty neurosis-increasing.

I should've willpowered through it, but the day was off-track after that. Then, didn't get to sleep until 11AM the next morning (modafinil + energy drink), and the next day was basically shot too.