Competing with yourself

This is my first post on the topic of mental health and personal development so I have to state this one more time: I am not an expert, not even close to one, the texts found in this section are based on things that have helped me or advice I’ve seen give results to my friends. You can look at these texts as friendly advice and not as recommendations coming from a professional. With that in mind, please take my words with a grain of salt but if these texts end up helping you A Tiny Bit I will be tremendously happy.

The only person you should be competing against and comparing with is yourself. This idea has been popular for a long time in the personal development circles but very few people delve into the details of why this is the case. The best example I can give is the one from my main field of expertise – fitness. Your genetics play a massive role in determining how much muscle you can build, but also how your muscles look and the only person with your exact genetic makeup is you. It is pointless to compare yourself with models from cover pages of magazines, actors or Instagram fitness personalities. Almost always their photos are edited to misrepresent the real picture. Obviously, that’s not the only issue, those people are almost always the genetic elite and there is no amount of effort and time that will make you look like them, but that is not a good reason for you to stop caring about your appearance. In addition, it is completely unproductive to compare your body after a year of training to someone who is a decade into their journey. If you’re comparing you with you then with enough time you will reach the best possible physique you can and that is worth it.

The second reason why I find it harmful to compare yourself with others is the fact that you cannot win the comparison game, you simply cannot win because there will always be someone who is better. Our society is overflowing with materialism so many people associate success with money or possessions, but if you start comparing your wealth to others, it’s not just that you will not win, you CANNOT win. It might be the case that you earn the most in your neighborhood, but there are some lawyers in the U.S. who by comparison make you poor, but there are business owners who are leagues above the lawyers, then come the elite athletes who laugh all the way to the bank with their million dollar contracts, but then oil giants and sheiks earn even more than them and then come Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. You can apply this to anything, from your ability to shoot a 3-pointer in basketball to the price of your shoes to the number of books you read in a week. Envying someone is senseless because nothing of value comes out of it and you will be stuck in this vicious circle of negativity. Similarly to genetics from the paragraph above, you do not have the same starting point as the people you’re comparing yourself with, but you do have the same starting point as yourself.

So start comparing you to you because you are the only person with your life, your genes, your tragedy, your experience and that is why you are the best measuring tool. If you are the same or worse compared to one year ago then it is time to change. Start small because small changes add up over time to set you up to make big changes later on.

Introduce a small change into your life, whether it’s reading books, eating healthier, working out, meeting cool new people, laughing more often or anything else, it will make you slightly better than yesterday. You can apply this to any problem or anything you would like to improve. You will be absolutely astonished by how much you can improve through small increments and if you really strive to answer the following question with a yes: “Did I do something today that’s going to make me better tomorrow?”