Comparing yourself to others

Because we are dedicating blog post to eachother now, I'm dedicating this to Fredriks friend from Canada, Stephanie, who visiting for a few days. I'll be writing my posts in English during that time. I'm dedicating the shirt-less photo on the left to David - anyone who has video-skyped him when he's at home will understand why.

Anyways, Stephanie is, as expected, an enoumously charming person which you just feel good around. We have adapted the rule of speaking English only in the precence of Stephanie. She keeps on insisting that she loves hearing Swedish, and says that it's okay for us to fall back on Swedish, but what she doesn't seem to realize is that we all love speaking English. Me, at least.

This post is a reminder to compete against yourself, not others. I watched a "documentary" movie a while back where man competes against animal in various situations, and in one particular episode, a marine were competing against some kind of primate with long arms on an assault course (that's hinderbana in sweden). After winning against this (Extremely fast) animal, the marine said, that "I keep my eyes fixed on the goal, looking forward - you don't win a race by looking at the sides or back."

Essentially, don't look too much at where you are in comparison to your competition. If they are much better off, it will just demotivate you. If they are much worse off than you, it will also demotivate you, because you won't push yourself as much. Compete, analyze and compare yourself, that's good, but do it with your former self, not others.

Really, this makes a lot of sense, as klichés often do, but you tend to forget about it in your daily life. Just today, I realized that I had been comparing myself to previous boyfriends in one of my previous relationships, instead of looking at whether or not *I* made improvements or not. Whether or not I was better than other boyfriends, former or future, is not really important, unless I'm not some game show. The truth would probably be that to her, I was better than former boyfriends, because she was worse at picking good ones, and they were less experience with life. I was, probably worse than the boyfriends she's getting now, because they will be older and more experienced, and whe will be better at picking them. In any case, comparing myself to ME is a much more valuable comarison than to compare myself to them.

Either way, the point is that I forgot. I compromised on the principle. Don't. Remember it in your daily life. Keep competing with yourself. It doesn't matter how smart och innovative your competition is, Tom Cruise and Apple does just fine looking forward only.