About Understanding Greatness
Understanding Greatness is built on a simple premise: history's greatest leaders are better teachers than the many leadership coaches, life coaches, and self-help books out there. Some of these may be useful. But I have always felt drawn in the opposite direction. Generals, statesmen or women, rulers, reformers. People whose names echo through centuries. Their decisions, made hundreds or even thousands of years ago, continue to shape the world we live in today.
The question this raises is obvious. What can we really learn from a Roman general or a Russian empress? How can their experiences be relevant to someone living and working today?
Undertanding Greatness' answer is that context changes, but the structure of hard decisions does not. Similar patterns keep appearing across centuries: fragile coalitions, impossible timelines, choices that carry real costs whatever is decided. Understanding Greatness tries to make those patterns visible, not to copy historical strategies, but to help you think more clearly about your own.
About me
I have always loved history. Military history, economic history, political philosophy. But for me it has never just been about the story. Whenever I read about the past, I find myself searching for something more: a lesson, a pattern, an insight that might still be useful today.
I grew up in the Netherlands with that curiosity and an early restlessness to explore the world. At sixteen I left for India as a UWC student, where I first encountered the idea that education could be genuinely transformative rather than just preparatory. I studied political science and loved it, but wanted to learn in more ways than just through books and studies. That eagerness to get my hands dirty pushed me ever onwards: internships at Unilever in China and Heineken in South Sudan, and eventually employment at companies from Silicon Valley, where I spent nearly four years at Facebook and two at Tesla.
I never sat across from Zuck or Elon, as they are known internally, but seeing both companies from the inside through some turbulent times, revealed something unexpected: despite their many similarities, the cultures could not have been more different. I trace that difference directly back to how differently Musk and Zuckerberg led, not just as personalities but as leaders. It also showed me, not from books but up close this time, that single individuals can and do change the world. People whose journeys started like anyone else's, but who navigated enormous pressure and made decisions that shaped everything around them.
Today I am the director of UWC Netherlands, a mission-driven educational organisation built on the belief that education can change the world. It is a role that keeps the question of leadership close: how individuals shape events, how they bring others with them, and what the rest of us can learn from watching them do it. UWC was founded on the belief that education, and small groups of determined people, can change the world. Nelson Mandela, the organisation's honorary president, embodied that more completely than almost anyone. His biography was one of many I read that, combined with everything I had seen and experienced, sent me back to history with different eyes.
To imagine what it must have been like to walk a mile in their shoes. Not just Musk and Zuckerberg, but Catherine the Great, Churchill and Mandela too, who faced challenges at a scale few of us come close to, but that are nonetheless recognisable. The same fundamental pressures, in different clothes. There have to be lessons worth drawing from that.
But what can we actually learn from people who faced challenges a hundred times larger than anything you or I currently face? That question turned out to be harder to answer than I expected. Leaders, I came to believe, are a problematic unit of analysis. They face different challenges at different moments and they learn and grow in response to what they experience along the way. If I wanted to learn something transferable, I needed to stop asking what made this person great and start asking what made the situations they faced so hard, how we can categorize these and what we can learn from how they responded.
That shift, from leader to situation, is what Understanding Greatness is built around. This growing library of cases and analyses is my attempt to make that learning available to anyone curious enough to look. I very much hope Understanding Greatness will not just prove interesting, but actually useful.
Lennart Hoedemakers
Amsterdam, June 2026
info@understanding-greatness.com