Winners don’t compete

We are taught from early on that our value is to be measured by others: our teachers, our peers, our coaches, standardised testing.

Parents reinforce it: Do well in school, get rewarded. Do poorly, get grounded.

This is flawed.

Recognition is a measure of performance but it is not a measure of improvement.

Validating performance by external evaluation has lots of downfalls:

• It’s not designed for high performance
• It doesn’t offer actionable feedback
• It doesn’t evaluate consistently
• It is almost always flawed

Let me ask a question. What is the most frequent month when NBA players are born?

The answer is January. In basketball, being stronger gives you an advantage. Age groups have a cut-off in December, so people from January are the strongest.

But is it the cut-off that makes the player? No, it’s a reflection of a cut-off point only.

Our external validation bias is so strong we end up with more January born players. But that is coincidental. If you are born in December, you can still be one of the best NBA players of all time.

People believe that better scores mean better outcomes. But there are plenty of ways that it is not true.

In adulthood, many can’t reconcile why they are top performers but never get top outcomes.

You can game the game. But you cannot game life.
— Probably Darwin. No, not really…

In life, performance is a measure of improvement. The faster you improve, and the more outcomes you achieve, the better you are off.

When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.
— W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance

We are all seeds, we all become roses. But the external world judges us as a rose. We compare ourselves to our brothers or sisters. To our friends.

The only way to lose is to compete. To achieve your full potential the only thing that matters is the rate of improvement.

Lucky for me I was taught differently.

Whenever I got a test result my parents would ask if “I felt happy with what I had learned”. If I said yes, they were happy. If I said no they would chastise me for wasting my time. Why would I waste time trying to get a high score on a test instead of learning?

They didn’t care about the score, growing up is all about improvement.

The analogy of racing the clock vs. winning a 100m race always comes to mind.

The only consistent competitive mindset is to beat the clock. Improve your lap time. Again. Improve your lap time. Again.

If you focus on winning the race, you might get recognition. But in the long term, it doesn’t work. You may win the game because you played lesser opponents.

Winning all the time is not a sustainable way to be competitive. You will always find circumstance or luck in the way. And winning against the whole world feels like taking a boulder up the hill.

Being competitive is the opposite. It’s demanding the most of yourself. It’s to have an improvement mindset. Is to surround yourself with the very best and learn from them.

You don’t have to push anyone down to make your way up.

But we do compete. So when should we look over our shoulder to see our competitors?

Our competitors matter so we can copy from them. They have a cool technique. They innovate in the way they run. They use better sports data. They eat better. They might develop better running shoes.

We need to keep track of our competitors in order not to allow them to have an unfair advantage. But that’s it.

The rest is on you: Keep improving, increase cadence, and lead on.

Begin again, never give up.