4. On Competition
My relationship to competition has always felt like a complicated one. For much of my life, it felt like it was less about competing against others, and more about comparing myself to others.
I’ve always played a lot of team sports, but if I’m being honest, for too many of my younger competitive years, I was more concerned with what my performance meant, rather than the team’s. If we produced a hard-fought win together, but I didn’t feel that I’d contributed in a meaningful way, the victory would be somewhat hollow, shameful as that is to admit now looking back.
It was because competition for me, was linked to comparing myself to others. Tracking and marking myself against them. This created a bubble that kept me at a distance from what others were enjoying, or bonding with them through commiserations. All too often, the highs and lows were seen through my prism, not the team’s - meaning neither were felt as fully as they should have been. I was short-changing them, and myself; I didn’t always feel like much of a team player.
“School, politics, sports, and games train us to compete against others. True rewards - wealth, knowledge, love, fitness, and equanimity - come from ignoring others and improving ourselves.”
Beyond the sports field and into my 20s I had gotten into a habit of feeling as though modern day life was a constant measuring contest, too. Whether it was the posts I was seeing on social media, adverts on television, or exaggerated and boastful blog posts of success stories, it seemed to me as though I was never short of opportunities to compare and contrast my achievements against others. It wasn’t making me feel great. But I couldn’t break the cycle.
And then one thought helped me to shift how I saw competition and its role in my life:
Our primary competition is our former self.
Our lives are centred around the idea of competing against each other. It’s ingrained into us at a very early stage. Think about development milestones for babies. What has become increasingly common is to track how a baby is going against a set of ‘average’ milestones on things like motor skills, cognition, language etc. And with good reason. Parents want what’s best for their kids. That’s an inherently natural approach to assume towards those we are responsible for. And part of this process is finding yardage sticks to signal when things might not be going according to plan.
The natural instinct to compare and contrast is just that, natural. We learn by studying those around us because it’s a useful tool to keep us on track for our own development.
Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous existentialist philosopher, goes further in his belief that we have to exist around other people in order to gain a full picture of ourselves:
“Whether or not you’re trustworthy is an aspect of who you are that’s ultimately decided by what other people think about you based on your actions. Other people’s opinions are undeniably useful and important in helping us to understand ourself.”
But how we feel about ourself should ultimately not be decided by comparing ourself to others, it should rely on tracking our own progress, by comparing the current version of us, to our former self.
Are we better today, than we were yesterday?
“I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.”
Being honest with ourselves about who we are today, in comparison to where we’ve come from in the past, is the only race that’s worth running.
Everyone is running their own race.
It’s the only one truly worth competing in, because it’s the only one we can have some level of control over.
We can learn from what’s happening in the lanes alongside us. But when it comes to who our competition is, it’s important to recognise that we should be looking back more often than we look alongside.
We need to view where we today against our former selves in our own lane, not others. If you are ahead of where you were yesterday, no matter by how much, and no matter how far along you are in your race, that’s all that matters.
I believe a lot of modern life is geared towards trying to get us to forget this simple fact. There’s too much money to be made in convincing us that we’re competing against everyone around us.
Buy these sneakers to move ahead, move to this suburb to feel like you’ve taken a step up in life, share this holiday pic to show how happy your family is.
It sounds like such an ordinary thing to do; to only worry about who you are today, against who you were yesterday. But if the answer to that question more often than not is ‘a tiny bit better’, we’re always going to be moving in the right direction, and hopefully one that matters to us.
We need to covet the ordinary.
And within the ordinary, lies an irony:
Mark Manson puts it succinctly by showcasing the flaw in logic that exists in so much of today’s culture when he says:
“It has become an accepted part of our culture to believe we’re all destined to do something extraordinary. The fact that this statement is inherently contradictory is missed by most people — if everyone were extraordinary, then by definition no one would be.”
Covet the ordinary.
Our primary competition is our former self.
Regret is a sign of progress. If you look back at your past self and see a fool, congratulations: you've grown.
These posts are written to remind our readers that; Life is hard, we’re all just trying our best and we could all do with a little help, no matter where it comes from.
How did the thoughts above impact on how you think about Learning from Competition? We’d love to hear your comments below.