This is Five Minute Friday, Compete With Yourself. Welcome back to the Super Data Science podcast, ladies and gentlemen. Super excited to have you on the show today.
And today’s idea came out of a conversation I was having with Paulo on our way from Yosemite to San Francisco. So for those of you who don’t know, Paulo is a colleague and a dear friend of mine and what we were talking about was ambition and being competitive, and how those qualities have served us in our lives.
And what we found is that both of us, both Paulo and I, are highly ambitious and highly competitive as well. And I know not everybody will agree that those are good qualities. Like they’ve definitely served us in our lives and they’ve helped us accomplish certain things. But indeed, I will agree that there is a school of thought that being highly competitive is not the best thing. It’s not the best quality to have because perhaps maybe you won’t get along with people as well, or it will be harder to be a team player, or it will maybe make your personality more rigid and people will feel kind of a bit, a bit tense around you.
Maybe being competitive is not the best idea in everybody’s mind. And that is totally fair. Both schools of thought are valid, whether you think that being competitive is a great quality to have or being competitive is something you don’t really want too strong in your personality. That is totally, I think both ways of thinking are totally fine.
But what we did agree with on Paulo was that there is a type of competition that in our minds would benefit absolutely anybody and people who engage in that type of competition are people who grow the fastest, are people who learn the quickest and accomplish truly great things. And that is competition with yourself.
And that, what that is seeing who you are for who you are and whether or not you go out there and you set yourself benchmarks by looking at other people and trying to be better than them and trying to, you know, like maybe even satisfy your ego to compete and prove to the world that you can do something better and stronger and faster.
Competition in yourself is different. Competition in yourself is internalizing, is sitting down and seeing what am I capable of right now? What’s, who have I grown to become? And we’ve all grown in our lives to become great people and some to be able to have capacity to create great things so far. But can we take that to the next level? If for instance, in your work, if you can code in Python, and you consider yourself an intermediate level. Can you take that and become advanced level? Can you take that and become an expert level in Python?
Or for instance in your interpersonal skills. Again at work, you find that you have grown over the past year to be able to present to an audience of 20 people comfortably, but can you take that to the next level and present to an audience of five executives or 200 people or maybe grow to the level where your presentation skills are such that you can actually teach someone else how to present.
Or maybe it might be in your personal life in terms of your fitness. You’re able to do 20 pushups in a row, maybe can you grow to do 25. And so that constant competition with yourself is what pushes us to grow and to become better all the time. That seeing yourself as not necessarily as an enemy or an opponent, but as, like as a role model that you want to outgrow, right? You definitely don’t want to grow, like, go backwards. You don’t want to go like, take steps backwards in terms of your growth, but you also don’t want to stagnate. You don’t want to be just always at some point, you don’t want to become happy with who you are, what level you are, but you want to constantly grow.
As Tony Robbins says, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. You want to be growing. If a business is not growing, it’s dying. If a relationship is not growing, it’s dying. Same goes for humans and our personalities and our skills. If we’re not developing them constantly, then they’re fading away.
And so what really helped both Paulo and I, what we found is that thinking about that, not through just the necessity of growth, but the necessity of becoming better, the necessity of competing with yourself and proving to yourself that, yes, I accomplished this. I got to this level, next time I can take it to the next level. I will focus on taking my skills or whatever it is to the next level and becoming better than I was before.
So that’s in essence, competition with yourself. And what I would like to challenge you to do this weekend is think of a space where, maybe two, think of a space where you have been competing with yourself for, usually these competitions last for a lifetime. Like for a very long time, you’ve been constantly pushing yourself through competition with yourself, and demanding from yourself more and more and more all the time.
And think of an area in your life where you haven’t. Where you’ve kind of like leveled out, you’ve plateaued. And if it’s something that you don’t really mind not having in your life, that’s fine. If it’s like a skill that you know, maybe you don’t, maybe it’s about, you were good at cycling and you no longer want to do cycling, that’s fine.
But maybe it’s something that you do value. It’s a skill or a quality, a personality trait that you do value, but you’ve stagnated, you stopped competing with yourself. Think of a personality trait like that, and maybe it’s time to challenge yourself to a competition. Challenge yourself to become better than the current version of yourself in that space.
So there you go. That’s competition with yourself and how it can propel you forward in any area of your life. The thing is you won’t always have a worthy opponent outside. You won’t always have a worthy, you can try find one, but not always they’ll be ready, available, somebody you can cycle with, to compete with them or somebody you can look at how they’re coding in Python and become better than that. You won’t always find a worthy opponent outside, but you will always find a worthy opponent inside. And that is you. How can you better compete with yourself?
Thank you very much for being here today, ladies and gentlemen. I look forward to seeing you back here next time. And until then, happy analyzing.
