"I have touched the highest point of all my greatness."

Wouldn't it be great to be great? Who among us doesn't at the very least aspire to be the best at what we do?

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon 'em" is probably one of the most famous Shakespeare quotes of all, and its popularity has been helped because it chimes with everything we read on the internet that offers advice or solutions for improving our lives.

The problem is - it's a scam.

It's what we might call fake muse - like so much of the internet, and the Large Language Models that are talking to us like the servile robots they are, tugging their metal forelocks and congratulating us for asking them such brilliant questions. The quote comes from a letter designed to flatter and trick the reader, Malvolio, into thinking his boss loves him.

Everywhere you look on the internet is motivational advice telling you that with hard work, discipline and application you can become truly great, but this fails to address the most important question - what do we mean by greatness?

This week I'll be reframing the definition of greatness. I'm not promising that I can help you run the hundred metres in less than ten seconds, but by the end of the show you'll have a better understanding of what it means to be truly great, and how you might be able to achieve it.

Oh and I'll explain how I was scammed this week just like Malvolio.

Plays featured in this episode are Twelfth Night, Twelfth Night and Twelfth Night, with a sprinkling of Hamlet and The Tempest and special guest appearance of Falstaff.

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"Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting."

Have you ever agreed to do something for someone while your whole body was screaming NO! Are you scared of the consequences of disappointing the people closest to you?

Well hello there friend, come and join me here at SOPPY - the Society Of People Pleasing Yes-men. I've always been a people-pleaser and you know what, there've been a few times when it's been really useful. People liked me - which was very helpful for the job I did for ten years of stand-up comedian, and I was pretty good at defusing potentially difficult situations. But on other occasions I've put other people's needs ahead of my own, or taken responsibility for other people's emotions, and there comes a time when you have to prioritise yourself.

There's a simple and obvious way to turn people-pleasing to your advantage that I've never seen anyone try but it works for me.

I'm hoping that by the end of the episode you'll have learned to check in on your emotions next time you find yourself saying yes when you mean no; you'll learn the power of 'let me get back to you on that' and you'll understand how to sit with your discomfort.

Just hoping, thanks to the Shakespeare Mindset I'm no longer judging my own self-worth on whether or not I make you happy. (But I will be delighted if you succeed. Old habits die hard, or as Bruce Willis would say, die hard too.)

Plays mentioned in this episode are Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Coriolanus and Tybalt & Mercutio, otherwise known as Romeo & Juliet.

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"So full of artless jealousy is guilt,

It spills itself in fearing to be spilt."

Jealousy can take many different forms, nearly all of which can be found in a single Shakespeare play, how we can spot it in others and heaven forbid, even in ourselves - and together we’re going to come clean about our resentful feelings in this department, and see if we can find a way, if not to avoid it completely at least to share space with it like the uncle who annoys you at Christmas but who you can cope with from a distance for the rest of the year.

I think you're likely to know which play I'm talking about - it's pretty much the set text of jealousy - yet Othello isn't the most jealous character in the play. Ooh given away which play it is now.

Key Shakeaways

1 The last person to admit they're jealous is usually you. By which I mean me. All of us. You know what I'm talking about here. Acknowledge the feelings, suppressing them won't make them go away.

2 Do what Shakespeare's characters did (along with Elsa): let it go. Let it GO!

3 Follow the advice of Orlando in As You Like It, stop worrying about other people and concentrate on your own life.

Shakespeare plays referred to in this episode:

Othello, The Winter's Tale, As You Like It

Other jealous references:

A famous John Lennon song. I'm sure you won't struggle to 'imagine' which one. (No, not that one)

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"Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom."

Everyone reads, we do it all of the time. Unfortunately for the vast majority of us that means scrolling up and down on our phones, an act that's bound to make us more anxious. If only we could spend more time with our heads buried in a good book - then again there's always a danger people will think we're a skinny little swot who should stop reading and go out and do something.

Key Shakeaways

1 Shakespeare was a voracious reader but sometimes he has a bit of a downer on it - in other words, read what others have to say, but you don't always have to agree with what you read, and you can make your own mind up.

2 Try and make it a daily habit, even if it's only ten minutes or so to begin with

3 This is more me than Shakespeare for obvious reasons but STEP AWAY FROM YOUR PHONE. Immerse yourself in the paper version of the book, not only does it stop you being distracted it also makes you better at concentrating.

Shakespeare plays referred to in this episode:

Julius Caesar, Richard III, The Tempest, Hamlet.

Other books that also get a look-in:

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to The Galaxy, Aristotle's Politics. Warning: occasional reference to Mein Kampf.

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"Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak / knits up the o-er-wrought heart and bids it break."

Do you sometimes find yourself feeling sad without realising why? You're not alone, like many people there's a chance you're dealing with melancholy. In today's episode I'll be looking at the reasons we sometimes feel this way, why we indulge the feeling and how to make a few small adjustments to make it so much easier to live with.

Key Shakeaways

1 First thing to do is acknowledge the sadness. Don't pretend nothing's wrong

2 Don't overthink it

3 Do something! Anything. Get a hobby. That's what I decided to do two years ago and here I am at Episode 26 of theShakespeare Mindset. I had no idea when I picked up that giant fusty old book from my schooldays that had always seemed impenentrable that it would take me on an amazing trip through Shakespeare to a realisation that 425 years ago he had so much to say about how to live our lives with intent, humour and free from anxiety.

Shakespeare plays and sonnets referred to in this episode:

The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet. Sonnets 30, 66, 71

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"I can no other answer make, but thanks, and thanks, and ever thanks."

There's nothing wrong with gratitude, as far as I'm concerned, but I'm starting to get a bit fed up with privileged middle class people like me walking around expressing gratitude for the universe as though that's going to make everything okay. If I'm sounding a bit grumpy I suppose it's because I always had a bit of a bad attitude towards gratitude. When I was a kid it was presented to me as something I resented. If I didn't thank grandma profusely enough for her latest useless birthday present my mum would tell me off for not showing enough gratitude. (And by the way, when you're trying to type your shownotes at speed one of the hardest words to consistently spell correctly is gratitude.)

But how much is enough? Shakespeare understood the dangers of making gratitude dependent on certain flattering behavious. King Lear has three daughters and he famously punishes the third one for not showing him enough gratitude. Oops chose the wrong one there mate.

Imagine thinking just because you're the king that people should be forced to show you gratitude.

Timon of Athens is the most generous king you'll ever meet, he expects nothing in return - until things start to go a little bit wrong, and debts are called in. Suddenly all those people he thought were his friends, simply because they liked hanging around him when he had money, are nowhere to be seen. Now he rails against their ingratitude. He's like my mum, only a lot angrier, also my mum never got banished from the kingdom, at least so far as i know.

At this point I think okay, I get it now. Timon's journey from riches to rags incorporates anger and denial along the way. But as the journey continues he comes to terms with the loss, and realises all that wealth was meaningless. When things go wrong, showing gratitude for the things that matter in life can be empowering.

Then again, if you listen to this show all the way to the end, and leave a nice review wherever you listen, I will be eternally grateful to you. Thank you for reading up to now. (Okay Dave this is getting obsequious, leave the poor reader alone.)

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"To unpathed waters, undreamed shores."

Every story has a beginning a middle and an end. This chestnut is so ingrained into our psyche and from such an early age that we might wonder if it’s included with eyes, legs, arms and the rest under ‘stuff we’re born with’. Long before we learned how to write things down homo sapiens were telling stories through pictures and sounds to teach survival and morality.

The Odyssey is nearly 3,000 years old and yet still speaks to us as though very little has changed. If you’re wondering why this three-hours long film is proving such a hit among the attention-deprived smartphone scrolling public, the answer is that the odyssey is a journey we all take, one we’re all familiar with, a story of who we are now, where we’ve come from, and where we’re looking to go. It also gives them a new classic heroic story to tell their friends – "I’ve just spent three hours in the cinema and I didn’t look at my phone once!"

In this episode I spend a little bit of time looking at Shakespeare's own journey from Stratford to showbiz, although we know almost nothing about the first few years.

It makes more sense to look at the effect the Odyssey itself had on Shakespeare, and how he used the various stories of Homer and Ovid within his own plays. There's Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, who so beguiles the Roman Emperor that he'd rather hang out with her in Egypt than attend to his duties in Rome. I mean, wouldn't you do the same? I'm sure he was treated with great reverence in Rome but wouldn't you rahter be hanging out in Egypt with a fellow ruler, pretending you're conducting great affairs of state when really all you're conductin is affairs?

Then there's Titus Andronicus (look away now squeamish people), Troilus and Cressida, and of course The Tempest. Yes I always seem to come back to The Tempest don't I. Hard to avoid that play in this case, shipwrecks landing on desert island are all the rage in The Odyssey.

There's also my own personal journey story related to that play - in my valiant battle with Chiltern Railways, did I get to see it on time or had I upset the Gods of train travel so much that they conspired to keep me away? All is revealed at the end of the episode.

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"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!"

Or as King Lear might have said to you at the time if you'd been standing next to him at the bus stop "Awful weather for the time of year wouldn't you say?" Why are we Brits so obsessed with the weather? Partly because of where we sit on the planet combined with our islands status, it makes us the receptacle of an awful loot of unpredicatable weather.

And it was even more the case in Shakespeare's time. The elements played a much bigger part in our lives than they do at the moment, current heatwaves excepted. In a couple of the plays the tone is set by the opening lines - 'Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,' Richard the Third says at the start of that play. While Macbeth begins famously with the three witches, the first asking "When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning or in rain?"

Shakespeare often uses the weather to evoke a sense of personality - think of the stormy nature of Lear, the man and the play, or the dark and broodiness that hangs over the whole of Macbeth.

As I often say, Shakespeare isn't so much a man with the answers as someone who knows how to ask the right questions, and he makes us think about how whatever kind of person we are, however much we think we can control events, nature has much greater control than any single individual. Even in a play like The Tempest, where Prospero invents a storm - he literally makes the weather - he can't change people.

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