I try to write about people competing against each other instead of trying to make themselves better, but it seems that I didn’t get to the point (here).
So, instead I’m going to try to explain it with a personal story. I went to Catholic school for a big part of my life (elementary and high school). It was a very hard and competitive school. One of the things that they used to have was a scorecard and a ranking. Most schools have scorecards but not necessary a ranking.
The scorecard was personal and you were supposed to give it to your parents to signed (or if you had bad grades, to your brother or sister). Due to the facts that half the things they are trying to teach you doesn’t interest you I don;t think the scorecard was useful (the concept of having one is, that one specific wasn’t).
The most interesting part was the ranking, which was public for the class. So your friends in your generation would know if you were in the top ten. Every month they would publicly say who were the top ten students in the class. I always thought it was funny that people (usually the top 5) were so interested on the results. From very young I saw people reactions to the rankings and how their feelings would changed when hearing what position they were. I’m going to focus on 2 people, the #1 (usually Gabriel) and #2 Pablo. Both really good friends of mine.
The #1, Gabriel, was always concerned about being the top of the list. He was very competitive and worked really hard to be the best compare to others. He was always #1 apart from a couple of months a year, where Pablo would jump into #1 for some strange reason (usually hard physics or chemistry test). The interesting part was that Pablo never ever cared about the ranking. He is naturally smart. Probably one of the smartest person I know. On the other side Gabriel, while smart, he had to work extremely hard to keep the #1 spot.
I enjoyed waiting for the rankings to come out and seeing how they would react. Here are some top lessons I learned:
1- Competition: You will never win that race.
If you are always competing against others and improving yourself just on others accomplishments, you will end up pushing yourself in the wrong direction. You will try to be the best on someone else’s sweet spot and you will end up on a never ending race of learning stuff you probably don’t care. And you can;t always win! There’s always someone smarter than you. Always.
In our particular example I saw it happen to Gabriel and Pablo. Gabriel went on to study electrical engineer in a private university. Coming from high school where he was #1 for more than 5 years he felt very confident. One day I got a call from him (first semester of collefe ended) that he was really down and depressed. He just had failed his first tests and he clearly knew that he was an average student in this new class. He asked me how did I deal with failing. More on this later.
It took him a whole year of suffering to recover. He had to understand that you can’t win every race against others because there are people smarter than you. Everywhere. You need to compete against yourself, not others.
I see this in startups all the time. They spend more time and energy on looking at the competitors list of features, metrics, valuation and press releases than caring about improving their own product, team and clients satisfaction. You need to compete against yourself, not others.
2-You should only compete against yourself
Probably you will think that this way of thinking was my excuse for being a mediocre student. In some way you are right. I ruled my whole student career under two principles: the “law of minimum effort” and the “law of this sh*t is interesting”. If you applied this rule when you are at school, on your grades you will for sure be just average. I was cool with it. The important thing to remember is that when you grow up you can choose to only rule yourself by one of this laws. Hopefully you choose wisely.
Back to the story. Pablo ended high school as #2 (or #3 maybe) and went on to study biochemistry at the public unviersity. He studied hard and when on to get a Master of Genetics. Today he is finishing his PhD and he runs one of the most prestigious labs in my country. If I have to bet I would say he will discover the cure for cancer or something similar. He still competes against himself. He is the best at what he does and he will constantly improve and challenge himself. Did he failed tests and got bad grades? Yes, he did. But we would laugh at them, because there were usually the G.E classes as anthropology (the kind I like).
