Whom should YOU compete with?

Competition is an important part of life, it makes us aware of our own capabilities, what we are good at, and where we need to improve.

This is the “survival of the fittest” era and if you want to survive you need to be at the top.

Right from school, we all have been taught to compete against each other. It was not told on our face, but subconsciously it was put into our minds that to achieve success we need to put our competition down.

Each one of us is in this competitive game since childhood. And we carry this competing vision further in many aspects of life, let it be our scores, assets, job, material things, etc.

The competition we have participating in is always YOU vs THEM.

Competing with others affects both the loser and the winner,

The loser loses his self-confidence and self-worth and starts self-doubting his abilities, also there are chances of developing jealousy towards the opponent, while the winner on the other side may develop an ego, overconfidence and he loses a huge chance of knowing his weaknesses and that’s the greatest loss.

Upon observing I understood that, YOU vs THEM was never healthy and not needed to compete.

What’s healthy and much needed is YOU vs YOU.

In YOU vs YOU, there’s no losing but winning.

In fact, you get a chance to know your weakness and that would be your greatest strength and you start to get better day by day, competing with yourself.

If this was taught to us earlier, we would have been aware of our weaknesses and strengths much sooner.

Competition is a must in life to survive, but it’s better and healthy if it’s YOU vs YOU.

Each time you compete with yourself your competition gets better at every level.

For example: If a runner and a swimmer consider each other as their competition. The runner will lose in the pool and the same will happen with the swimmer on the race track. Here, neither the runner will get to learn his mistakes, nor the swimmer. But if they both start competing with themselves, they surely are going to develop each day by tracking their previous records and not repeating the mistakes made.

In another example, a boy wants to learn to play guitar, now psychologically we all consider someone as our competition who is better than us at that particular thing. So he considers his friend as his competition who is better than him and has been practicing guitar past two years. Now as the boy tries to compete with him, and even after two years of practice he wasn’t able to beat his competitor, because when that boy had an experience of two years, his competitor had an experience of four years, and this was a never-ending race. His competitor will always be ahead of him by two years and the boy will always lose trying to beat him, but if he was to be competing against himself, he would’ve been aware of his mistakes, accomplishments, and future goals.

So this is how the YOU vs YOU competition helps.

“Every time you practice you compete against yourself and with every practice, you raise your level of competence”