“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.  Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.  Try to be better than yourself,” William Faulkner.  Competition doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things.  We know being the best at Candy Crush really doesn’t matter.  Being the best at anything really doesn’t matter.  What matters is what we do with it and what we do with the privileges and opportunities being in that position can afford us.  We are only limited by our minds so why would we place a limit on ourselves to only surpass others?  Great, we got there first, but what do we do when we get there?  Are we just waiting for the next race to start?  When we push ourselves past what we thought we could do, we set a new bar for ourselves, and perhaps in the process, it’s a new bar for others as well, but the point is that we don’t know our true limits until we push the boundaries of what we thought we were capable of.

I had a realization that I’m going to dive into more later in the week about enjoying the planning stages of things.  That stage is absolutely magical because when we are at that point of imagining and envisioning something, there are absolutely no limits.  Literally anything is possible—if we think it, in that moment, it is real.  There is something so freeing and exciting in limitless opportunity.  In that moment we are the flea without the lid on the jar, able to jump to our fullest height.  Not that we want to be fleas, but the point is we haven’t been limited by the lid on the jar—our own fears, doubts, uncertainties that creep in.  Once those take root, we can never attain the height we are capable of.  When we reach a goal, of course celebrate and be happy, but start looking at the next benchmark until we are fully satisfied with the outcome. 

Competing with others becomes hollow and pointless after a while.  There will eventually be no one else to compete with because they will either lose interest or we will.  Either way there will be a point when we will not feel the same sense of satisfaction we used to when we accomplish something.  We have to learn to love what we do, not for the sake of winning, but for the sake of doing our best.  When we approach our goals and dreams that way soon we see that we can go so much further than we ever thought.  Competition with others was never the point—the point was to develop ourselves enough that we become the best version of who we can be.  There is purpose and satisfaction in that—and purpose is the ultimate goal in life.  When we are 1% better than who we were yesterday, we open up new doors just by bringing that little extra to the game.  Imagine how we can change the game when we get all the way up.  Think of the fulfillment from living life all the way on.  THAT is where the excitement is.