Posted by Let no one deceive you, competition is good. It helps you motivate yourself, improve your skills, brush up your reactivity, gain more knowledge and intelligence and know yourself better, where you have an advantage and where you don’t do too well. Comparison is also great, in that it helps you measure your work, how far you have come and how good you are doing in relative to others around you. It will also inspire you to try to do more if you feel you are not measuring up. All of these helps you grow and become a better person in totality.
However competition and comparison becomes unhealthy when instead of using it as a medium of improving yourself, you turn it into a “better than you” race and use it to constantly monitor another person’s progress, what they are up to, how they are living their lives and what they will do next. This makes you envious and hate may begin to crawl in. You begin to over flog yourself for them being better than you and instead of making progress, you start retrogressing. Then you start looking for excuses why they are better and blame others for your woes, this may push you into doing something to pull them down or put them at a disadvantage.
In life, there is only one race you should be running, the race of you against you. Everyone is in their own lane and trying to outrun themselves. You should check your yesterday and see how you ran, if you did not do so good, put in more effort today. If you ran too fast slow down a bit, if you ran too slow hasten up a bit. From time to time take a peep at the other lanes, see how others are doing, if you are too behind, put in more speed to catch up, if you are ahead good job! Don’t forget that everyone is different and so are the lanes, some have straight smooth lanes while others are more rugged and curvy. Some are born with long legs and some came out dwarf, some with good health and some bad.
Therefore the race of life should be personal and not competitive. Out do yourself not others. Try always to be better than your previous self not others. If you fix your gaze at others for too long, you may hit a stone and stumble. Keep focus, keep your head straight, watch out for bad terrains and weather, work hard and you will see that in the end, you will be the better one.