COMPETING WITH YOURSELF IN LIFE + BUSINESS
In business and life, who are you competing with? Are you working everyday to compete with who you were yesterday, or are you in a cycle of competing with others?
Competing with others is living life with eyes sideways, always focusing on what others are doing.
While keeping a pulse on what others are doing gives you a good measure of what you need to work towards, growth and momentum first comes from a focus of becoming better than you were yesterday.
Here are a few thoughts on internal competition in business and life.
Why Internal Competition Wins Every Time
When your focus is on beating someone else, your energy becomes reactive. You’re constantly chasing and scrambling to catch up.
But when your competition is mainly internal, you are focusing on the things you can control, such as your own progress.
Until you can start to focus on you - how you can get better at sales, how you can add more value to your clients, how you can have a better attitude - you will always feel behind. If you’re looking at someone who is ahead of you, you need to realize that 99% of the time, there is a reason why they got there when they did and why they have what they have.
So ask yourself, what did they do that I need to do to better myself?
Here are questions you can ask yourself:
“How can I sharpen what I already do well?”
“Where can I push my discipline further?”
“What would the best version of me do today?”
When you focus on these factors and bettering yourself, you naturally begin to level up.
Help Others Win
Helping others win will help you win.
Success isn’t scarce, even when it feels like it is. In business, the most successful people I know and observe help other people win and succeed.
What Internal Competition Looks Like
Keeping your promises to yourself, even when no one’s watching
Tracking your own progress compared to where you were last year or last quarter
Setting higher standards each month or each quarter
Refusing to coast, even when you’re “doing better than most” - someone will always be doing better than you
Studying your habits more than you study their content
Competition isn’t bad, it is a helpful tool in becoming better each day. And if you are going to compete with anyone, compete with yourself. Work to become someone who is outgrowing old patterns, out-disciplining your past self and doing things that the past version of yourself couldn’t do or accomplish.
And watch what happens.
x, LG Curry