Being competitive is a great thing to quickly improve yourself at any given task. It makes you push yourself in a way that you never even thought was possible and had there been no competition, you would have most likely never even realized exactly how much potential you actually have. While it sounds like a really good thing but everything in life comes at a price. It doesn’t mater if you know about it beforehand or not and neither does it specify that it has to be paid before or after getting the thing that you want. For example, a common place to find competition is in your college or university where you can compete for grades. In order to get higher grades, you have to allocate more of your time to studying and cut back on your other activities. This is your price to pay and the reward is that you will improve your grades and get all the benefits that come along with it. This is normally a very beneficial and sensible deal for students since the most important thing to them is generally a higher grade and they do not have much responsibilities that need to get cut off for them to make the time. It is a win-win situation. Since it is still your student life, you can still make some time for the things you like but that time would be nowhere near the time as another student who focuses primarily on having fun. If grades are more important to you than you shouldn’t compare yourself to the other student who is having more fun and make yourself miserable over it. These do comparisons do not go together at all and are only making you feel bad about yourself. As I have said that everything comes at a price; you are sacrificing your time for the thing that is most important to you i.e. grade and the other student is sacrificing his grade for the thing that he deems more important i.e. having fun in life.
The same concept about competition can be applied to any other scenario in life as well but you have to understand whether that comparison is indeed a valid one or are you just making an unrealistic comparison to make yourself feel bad. Maybe you are working more hours per week in order to save money while someone else is simply not working as much. It is clear that you are getting more money for your time but what if that other person you are comparing yourself to earns more than you because he is in an executive position and has 10 more years of experience than you? or what if the other person is simply working in another country where the cost of living is higher? You can work two jobs to make the same amount of money but not only will you work twice as hard and spend more time by doing so, but you will also feel more miserable about yourself. This is the kind of comparison that is not beneficial for you but it is harming you instead. You are sacrificing too much for unrealistic goals and no matter in which aspect you are comparing yourself in, life is not confined to it as it is an amalgamation of multiple different things. For example, it is not only about money, it is also about having a good career. If you do not like a particular field then you should not compare your favourite field with it, as it is not your interest in the first place. Money is not everything in life and you also need the satisfaction from your job and have a clear hierarchy defined for it so that you can keep going forward. You also need to spend time in your hobbies to refresh your mind so that you do not burn yourself out. You also need to spend time with your family and do other stuff to fully enjoy your life rather than later realizing that you have wasted all of your time chasing after only one thing and neglected the other aspects of life completely.
The thing that you have to understand is that you cannot compare an apple with an orange just because both of them are fruits. They are entirely different fruits and even if an apple feels miserable all of his life due to a lack of Vitamin C, which is present in an orange, it will serve no purpose other than making the apple miserable. Similarly, an orange can feel as bad as it can about not having more Iron in it than as compared to an apple, but it only make the orange feel bad. It doesn’t produce more Iron in the orange itself. The essence of this analogy here is that both are different and both are providing value in different aspects. Both should be appreciated in their own right. You can already be providing special value in some other aspect and just because another aspect is more appealing to you for now, you should not neglect your own worth and keep making yourself fight an uphill battle.
If you are going to compare yourself to someone else in any field, then make sure that you are both playing on an even field. A good place to start would be to list all the things that differentiate you from your competition and then identify which of those play a role in making the differentiation in that field only. Let say it is about making money and your competitor is based on another country and is investing in things there. You competitor is also diversifying his sources of income. Now the thing you have to understand is that this is not an even playing field at all. In order to make it even, you have to move to that country as well so that you can have access to those overseas businesses as well. If that is not possible for you then you should not feel bad even if you make less money than your competitor. Instead, you can find inspiration to diversify your sources of income as well and invest in similar businesses in your country to increase your revenue. In such cases, you should compare yourself to a version of you from your past and keep repeating this. If you were only making $100/day in the last month but now you are making $120/day then you are making progress already and you should aim higher for the next month as well. in such cases, you can either use this approach to make sure that you are playing on an even field with your competition and make steady progress or you can compare yourself with someone else who is making $1000/day but is also not on the same playing field to make yourself feel more miserable. The choice is yours but I would highly recommend that your competition should be you and you should keep setting challenging yet not unrealistic goals for yourself. Instead of always comparing yourself to someone else to push yourself, you should think about how you can add more value to someone else’s life and anything that you do with this objective in mind, you will surely succeed at it. Good luck!
