Why I stopped trying to be the best
A couple of years ago, I began the process of removing every personal reference I had to being ranked as the best at anything.
This mindset generally places me in competition with others. And, I don’t want that to be my life. I do not want to look around trying to measure my journey comparative with others so as to say “I am best”. Neither do I want to be in relationships where one has to look to my own journey or anyone else’s to evaluate their own progress. Competition is palpable, and you know it when you are being weighed, measured watched.
To avoid this, I do two things:
I play in the infinite game. Instead of competing with others, I compete with myself. How can I improve from last year? How do I allocate my time daily? Can I gain control of an additional hour each week until I have full command of my life? We have no idea how fulfilled and powerful we become when we focus on being the best possible version of ourselves instead of the best at something external thing based on rules determined by random systems and arbitrary metrics.
I create a vision for my life and hold it as my north star. What do I want to die working on? This shouldn’t be attached to an organization or a group identity. It should be a broad vision that imagines a better future for us all. My guiding star is ensuring that young people have access to quality education and that they and their families can lead decent lives. I have no aspiration to be president or CEO or to work in some big corporation. Yet, I am open to diverse paths that help me express this vision. It is, in a way, being ambitious but without ambition.
This is not an easy ask in the age of social media – a time of constant comparison and consistent competition, with friends and strangers. But getting this right will change all our lives.
I’ll end with a quote by Seneca:
Tranquillity is the sense of your own path and how to stay on it without getting distracted by all the others that intersect it. In other words, it's not about beating the other guy. It's not about having more than the others. It's about being what you are, and being as good as possible at it, without succumbing to all the things that draw you away from it. It's about going where you set out to go. About accomplishing the most that you're capable of in what you choose. That's it. No more and no less.
