When You’re Competing Against Others, Follow This Rule
Something I’m not sure whether I should be ashamed of or incredibly proud of is my ability to motivate myself based on what other people achieve. Sometimes, I’ll set a goal, and people will say, “What makes you think that you can do that?”
Chances are, if somebody has done it before, that’s my reason. I rarely, if ever, think that I can’t achieve something. That’s why I feel it’s a good quality; self-doubt isn’t really a vice of mine.
On the other hand, it’s something eerily similar to envy, which will probably lead to me sending you Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box one day. (Obscure reference of the day.) People say you should internally self-motivate, which I guess is healthy, but I respond just as well to external competition. I figure if it works, then it works.
Let’s talk about a practical problem with this, aside from the “Dear Diary” diatribe from above.
The Problem With External Motivation: Meet Somebody The Internet Marketer
Let’s talk about a common scenario.
You’re bored of your job. You Google “How To Make Money” and you find a blog post by some guy who lives the internet marketing life; he travels the world, he makes $10000 a month and he works two hours a week. He says that you can too (usually, the secret is contained in his $297 $197 $59 make money online course.
You think that it’s great… especially when you see the pictures of his Lamborghini and his five star book shelf (or hot girlfriend, whatever.) You eagerly start a blog, and you write about how to make money yourself. You write about your journey. You sell an ebook. It sells four copies in one month!
Eventually though, you start to think that the guy is lying… you’ve been doing this six months and you’re still in Nowhere, Nebraska and not in the Hollywood Hills. You check your daily traffic… it’s still fifty visits per day, and not fifty thousand a month. You only make $100 a month, which is nowhere near your ten-thousand dollar goal.
You give up… and probably go on a forum to talk about how everyone on the internet is a liar.
Competing With Successful People Is Terrible When You Start
If I told you that you could make an extra $100 a month, you’d probably be interested. Who doesn’t want an extra hundred dollars? Yet that’s essentially what happened to the guy above. He ended up with an extra $100 a month.
Then he quit.
He quit because his expectations based on external competition set his sights very high. When you do something in order to compete against others, you run the very real risk of ending up like the guy above. The chances of you failing are high, and the chances of burnout are massive. (I’ve burned out on more business ideas than most people would ever think of starting.)
Now, the sensible, obviously-follow-this advice is to never, ever compete with anyone else: just compete with yourself.
Of course, if you’re an external competition kind of person, you’re going to ignore that advice and do it anyway, which is what we’ll discuss now.
How To Avoid Competitive Burnout
Alright, you’ve decided to come to the dark side. You’re unleashing the part of you that wants to compete against other people and eclipse their success. Despite what self-help motivational gurus would have you believe, you’re not alone. A hell of a lot of successful people have been motivated by the desire to one-up their fellow man.
Here’s an example: UFC World Champion Fabricio Werdum. You might think, as an athlete, he was possessed with an unusual self-drive and determination. You’d be wrong. He started Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu because he got beaten up by a love rival:
The first thing you need to do is be honest with yourself. Forget other people – don’t tell them that you really want to beat the hell out of the guy that punked you in front of your girlfriend. Tell them some other family friendly motivation like “you want to challenge yourself” or “get healthy.”
Then let’s get to work.
Don’t Compete With The Big Guys To Start With
As a writer, I could try and be more successful than Stephen King. It’s not a good strategy though: He has millions in the bank, a few decades of experience and a whole published catalogue of mega-successful books. I have absolutely none of that. I’d be setting myself up for disappointment if I tried to compete with Stephen King. The same is true of a person trying to get big abs or make as much money as Bob The Billionaire Blogger.
When you’re trying to be competitive, you need to choose your targets wisely. If you started karate, they wouldn’t stick you right in with the black belts for training. There’d be no point, you wouldn’t learn anything and you’d quit.
Pick someone you can beat in a short amount of time. If you see a writer whose books are terrible, then be more successful than them. Build a better product, release it like a pro, and defeat them. If you pick really low-hanging fruit, you’ll achieve it quickly.
Success in any field comes from choosing small but important battles and winning them decisively. That’s when you start to develop all the mindset stuff that self-help gurus talk about.
If you see a small business in your area that never turns up to their appointment, overcharges and under-delivers on quality, then compete with them, not with Apple. Then move on to the next target.
Over time, you’ll get into the habit of winning, and according to Sun Tzu, 90% of the battle is knowing you’re going to win. (I made that up.)
Final Thoughts
You can attempt one big victory in a David Versus Goliath battle for the ages. However, chances are high that Goliath will stomp on your head and you’ll be defeated.
Alternatively, we can pilfer another myth, and you can model yourself around Hercules. He takes on tasks and competitors of increasing stature to match his own wit and strength, and then emerges victorious.
At this point, you get where I’m coming from, so I’ll stop butchering history and mythology and leave you to pick your first victims.