Choosing Between Being Better Than Your Competition and Being Your Best

In business, sports, and other areas of life, it can be tempting to base our sense of success on how we compare to our competition. But doing so also poses at least two dangers.

First, we can choose to settle for far less than our potential. Because if we focus on the competition, the goal can turn into simply doing better than them, not in doing our best — and that’s a big difference. In some cases we may be able to outperform them and still have the potential to do far more. But if we reach our goal of doing better than our competition, and our motivation isn’t to pursue our best, it can be easy to settle.

Another trap is that we can begin to secretly desire others to fail. Remember taking exams that were graded on a ‘curve.’ If you knew that you had missed several questions, it was suddenly quite easy to hope that others would miss questions too — because if everyone else fails, it will make our shortcomings less noticeable. But in the end, this doesn’t make us actually any better. It just makes us relatively better compared to our competition.

But being better than our competition and being are best are two very different goals.