Look in the mirror, that's your competition

 

Today while working out at the Gym, I saw a solitary shaker bottle placed on the floor near the squat rack. The bottle had a yellow lid and a message inscribed boldly on the body- “Look in the mirror, that’s your competition.” The message struck me as I pondered on the simplicity of the statement and yet its deep connotation.

Social media is all over and every person has an infinite influence stream sitting in their pockets at all times. People are influenced by the media and want their lives to be just like the ones portrayed on social media sites. Often, these are exaggerated realities.

What happens when all day you receive feeds of the perfect bodies, perfect hair, flawless skin, million-dollar earnings, partying on yachts, luxury cars, designer clothes, and other endless influences? You start to question your worth through the gap between your reality and the things being portrayed. You set the wrong benchmarks while setting your ambition and goals.

Let’s assume you are a fitness enthusiast who is working hard to get a particular physique. You have people around in the gym who have toned muscular bodies. You also see a ton of feeds on your Instagram or YouTube where fitness influencers display their chiseled bodies. You feel that they are working hard and building muscles whereas there is something wrong with you if you are not getting results.

We tend to ignore the fact that the other person has a different genetic makeup, a different muscle reactance to load, and may even be using steroids to uplift his muscle-building game. You only place stress on the way he/she looks in the pics or videos and you too want to have that physique. This leads to unrealistic expectations and a desire to look perfect while disregarding the progress one has made from the day one started.

The act of comparison begins in the family itself. The performance of the kids in school is compared to the other kids. Often, this leads to infusing an unhealthy sense of competition in kids. Parents approve of their kids if they get good grades or if they are able to beat the kid next door in a competition at school.

The kid grows up assuming the world to be a competitive place where it is important to win at any cost. The kid feels free to use devious means to get ahead. This also impacts their mental health as the race to outperform stresses them often ending in breakdowns. The suicides by students failing to score well or get through into good colleges are common news we hear.

This trend continues in the life of the kid after he grows up as an adult. He now competes in the professional world for better paychecks and recognition. The battles for power, prestige, and money get intense and the focus is on projecting a grandiose image of oneself. The comparison in terms of the type of car, the size of the house, and the number of assets owned become an instrument to gauge one’s position in the social hierarchy. Wealth becomes the metric to measure happiness in life. In order to earn more than the competitor the person loses a night’s sleep, loses quality time with family, becomes distant from kids, and in the end with himself.

This act of constant comparison only leads to distraught in life. In the book ‘The Almanack of Naval Ravikant’ the author points out that desire is a contract of unhappiness. Till the time you have achieved that goal, you decide to be unhappy as the absence of that thing keeps you wanting it more.

The desire to be like someone is an ever-changing concept. Once you succeed at a given goal, the goal shifts. The achieved goal becomes a new constant and the desire to achieve the next goal takes center stage. In his podcast, Morgan Housel says that when you don’t want something and you don’t have it, it does not matter to you; when you want something and have it, you feel ok or maybe great for some time, but when you want something and can’t have it, you go mad. This is a never-ending loop you get trapped in.

So, what is an ideal approach to setting goals? Instead of constantly comparing oneself to others and striving to outperform them, the emphasis should be on self-reflection, self-awareness, and self-improvement. The ultimate goal should be to become the best version of oneself, continually pushing boundaries, setting new goals, and surpassing previous achievements. There will always be someone who would be doing better than you, be it in any domain. So, ditch the habit of always competing and comparing, it may ever keep you unhappy.