One of the more egotistically painful lessons I’ve learned through the martial arts is that there is always someone better than you.  Someone better, faster, stronger, higher-jumping, etc. than you are. Even worse, even if all you did was focus on the training there are still folks out there who are better in those areas that you can possibly be.  I spent a good deal of time beating my head into this idea (fruitlessly) before finally accepting it.  Once I got over the hump of wanting to be the absolute best at something, I could finally focus on just doing MY best.

It’s the Same Everywhere

Our professional lives are no different - there’s always someone who knows the tech better, is paid more, has a “better” job etc. There’s always someone who puts in more effort, gets more blind luck, etc. And while there’s no Olympics of coding (or tech… or finance…), you can bet that if there were most of us wouldn’t come close. It can be incredibly hard not to obsess over those differences. This is a very slippery slope; once we start we end up spending more and more time thinking about those things. At best this ends up sapping energy and focus from things that are actually important - work projects, family, friends, your self, etc.

The worst part about this is the energy we spend obsessing over others results in less energy to spend on becoming better ourselves. The very “problem” we are concerned with ends up taking away from a solution to that problem. While there are a great many things we can focus on in people who are “better” than us, there’s also a great many things we can focus on to get past this mental trap.

Getting Over the Hump

The best way to move past this is to simply accept that there are others out there, somewhere, that are better. After all, it’s factually true, and you (hopefully) don’t dispute gravity, so why this? That said, this is hard… really hard. It requires giving up some portions of the self that can be really satisfying to entertain (who doesn’t love imagining what it’d be like to be the best at something?). It initially takes a LOT of mental energy to not allow those thoughts to surface (why is it NOT doing something can be harder than doing something?…).

This is a challenging skill to build, but the effort is more than worth it. Learning to first identify, then stop, then completely avoid, going down the “I’m not the best” rabbit hole takes a lot of conscious effort. There are a few tricks I’ve learned to help:

• Acknowledge when those thoughts pop up - we cannot stop something if we don’t know it’s there. Simply realizing that you’re having these thoughts is a great first step in curbing them. This might take the form of writing it down, saying it out loud, or simply telling myself mentally that it happened. Over time you’ll end up training yourself to automatically do this and save yourself the trouble.

• Redirect the thought - Instead of thinking “Sally’s so much better than me”, I ask myself “Why can I learn from Sally to get better?”. This helps convert the potentially time wasting effort into something that I can use to improve. Depending on the situation I might even go talk to Sally and pick her brain a bit (I’ve met a LOT of great people this way).

• Get external validation - I find it way too easy to convince myself I’m not doing “well”. It helps to ask others how they think I’m doing. This will either give me positive feedback to help boost me up, or give me some (hopefully) constructive feedback on how to improve.

Just like in the martial arts, the fact there is someone better doesn’t mean that each individual can’t, or shouldn’t, do their best to be their best. While in some cases another’s success can come at the cost of our own (e.g. not getting the job opening), in most cases other’s success is, at “worst” neutral to us (e.g. we don’t get harmed in any way by it). Many times their success can actually help us (a teammate develops a better process that helps the whole team and gets promoted), so instead of focusing on “why aren’t I the best”, take time to focus on “how can I become the best me?”.