I am speaking tomorrow morning in Trumbull, Connecticut. The theme of my speech is the need to create in your routine some activity that can lead to a life-changing event.

I have studied successful people for thirty years and concluded that very few of them are uniquely intelligent, talented, good-looking or even lucky. Rather, they are for the most part people who identified something they felt strongly about, and then took off after it with all they had.

My belief is that everyone has some kind of greatness inside of him or her. Maybe it’s an instinct for computers … or cars. Writing or welding. Athletics or animals. Something that one is innately good at and passionate about.

Highly successful people identified their area of greatness and then went for it.

For most of us, life gets in the way of a full-hearted pursuit of individual greatness. The need to make a living … the hours needed to be a good parent, spouse or friend … inertia – that hugely powerful force that keeps us doing today that which we did yesterday.

My speech tomorrow morning is about establishing a connection with one’s potential greatness.

I am going to suggest that people take a risk – pull time, energy and even capital from some other part of their life and use it to pursue an activity that could be a life-changer. Write a book or a screenplay. Build a better mousetrap or, a better mouse. Design some jewelry or clothing. Start an online business. Something that could take off and lead to a whole new adventure and level of financial recognition.

There are of course no guarantees. And the result of all the effort may be nothing more than fatigue, frustration and loss of money. But, hey, that’s what the risk side of the equation is all about. And everyone knows “no risk, no reward.”

One of my favorite authors is Victor Frankl, a physician who spent 4 years in a Nazi concentration camp. Here are Frankl’s words, which I interpret as support of my premise for finding ways to shake things up:

“Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension in inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. … I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, ‘homestasis,’ i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”