Compete with Yourself, Every Day

The original meaning of the word compete was to "strive with."

In Western culture, we've turned that into "strive against."

And while it can be helfpul to have an opponent to strive against, over the course of your life, you'll go farther faster using your competition as a measuring stick for yourself than you will making the competition the enemy.

Competing with themselves is what allows the all-time greats to be great.

They focus on being better than they were last game, last month, or last season.

They compare themselves to who they were early in their career, not the person on the other side of the court.

They're interested in how they become the best they can be. Competition is a way to monitor progress, not define their future.

This focus on being better than yourself allows you to let go of one of the main killers of motivation: comparison with others.

There will always be someone bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, or more talented than you are.

Focusing on that, and striving against them, is only likely to make you feel small and hopeless, since there's nothing you can do to change that.

By shifting your focus to competing with yourself, you can assume complete control of your progress and destiny. You can know intimately if you're getting better or getting worse.

If you're on the path to being the best you can be.

And being the best you can be is the only thing that gives you a real chance to be elite.