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Life Is Not a Competitive Sport

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Humility helps us recognize our strengths and limitations without ranking our worth against others.

Replace comparison with curiosity about what you can learn from someone else’s success.

Focus on your unique contributions and take small actions guided by your values.

Someone else’s success can inspire you without becoming a verdict on your worth.

We have all fallen into the comparison game at some point. Someone shares pictures from their exotic international trip. Someone else shares a professional achievement on LinkedIn. Yet another shares photos of their picture-perfect family. Whether these posts share the full story is a topic for another day, but the underlying commonality is how they can make us feel: like we will never be good enough or are somehow falling behind.

There is an excellent book by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility, which touches on these themes. In it, the Zanders discuss what they call "the measurement world", describing how we all evaluate, compare, rank, and assign value to ourselves and others based on the variables that are most important to us. Their suggested antidote to this problem is to consider how one can uniquely contribute to the world around them without getting caught up in the comparison game.

They quote Martha Graham as told to Agnes DeMille to illustrate this idea:

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time. This........

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