"There is no kind of ultimate goal to do something twice as good as anyone else can. It's just to do the job as best you can. If it turns out good, fine. If it doesn't, that's the way it goes." -- Chuck Yeager
When you compete against somebody else you are letting what they can do limit what you will do.
First, if you are motivated by doing better than somebody else you are satisfied when you have achieved that. You lose your motivation to do more. You will never know if you might have been able to do three or four times better than they have done. Herb Camburn, a theater teacher at California State University - Long Beach, was a tremendous influence upon me. He taught us to never compete against others, but to constantly compete against ourselves. He didn't grade us by the quality of our project compared to the work done by others, but by how much we had improved by working on the project.
Herb taught us to critique our own work by evaluating what worked well and what we would do differently the next time. He didn't want us to try to impress him. He said if we worked to impress him, our progress would stop when we left school. He said as long as our standard of quality was based on somebody else our potential would be limited. He wanted us to impress ourselves. If our standard of quality was based on improving upon our own past efforts our potential was unlimited because we would never reach it.
He constantly stressed the need to challenge ourselves. He pressured us to take risks. He would not accept us doing good work by relying on what we already knew. He wanted us to attempt things that would increase our knowledge and skill. More than once I heard him say an interesting failure was better than a boring success.
Often you can learn more from your failures then you can from your success. I kept a journal during my first season with a circus. We were doing a beauty contest act where the audience voted for their favorite clown. Early in the season I won consistently and I wrote that I didn't understand what I was doing that was so good. In a later entry I referred to a day in which I lost the beauty contest. I was able to figure out why. I wrote that I had been upset by something that had happened while we were setting up tents earlier that day, and I was thinking about myself during the act instead of focusing on audience members. The importance of forgetting what had happened before the act by concentrating on what was happening during the act was something I could learn only by failure.
On a recent episode of the television series "Last Man Standing", Eve, the youngest daughter, sings a solo song at an open mike session and receives a standing ovation. She decides after that success to leave music. She asks her father, "What if I continue and I fail?'
Her father says, "Honey believe me, you will fail because that is part of life."
I have been doing a lot of volunteer work with the Boy Scouts of America. One of their concepts is providing conditions with limited risk where it is safe for boys to fail. An important life lesson is that failure is usually temporary. You can be proud of what you have done if it was your best effort. Then you take what you learned from the failure and use it to succeed in the future.
Another reason for not competing with others is that if you are motivated to do something better than anybody else you limit your focus. For example, if you admire an entertainer who does great balloon sculpture and you want to do better balloon sculptures than they do, that focuses your attention on balloon sculpture. That causes you to ignore other options. You might excel at something else like origami.
How can you compete with yourself? Do you always do your best? How can you continually improve your efforts? How can you challenge yourself? How can you limit risk so it is safe to fail? How can you learn from your failures? How can you widen your focus beyond what others are doing?
