Me vs. Myself and I’m Winning

I heard that line in a song recently but I can’t remember where it is from. Time for a Google search…

I came up empty on that search. Time to email my friend, his brain is full of hip hop and television trivia, if he can’t help me out no one can…

Alright so I came up empty on my research but it is still an interesting topic and one that I am going to tackle here.

Competing with yourself is essential. It is impossible to take on the world. You can take on yourself with ease though. Runners do this all the time and even have a phrase for it, “Personal Best.” To get a Personal Best (PB) means that you have topped your old time in a race; in effect you have competed against yourself and won.

My personal best in a 5 kilometre run is 19:03 minutes. It seems to be my limit though because I run often and I always time myself. I have come close to that time but I have never surpassed it since I made that PB. I guess I could take that as a negative, but I don’t. I know what I am capable of. I know my pace and I can now judge how far I have run by how long it takes me.

What if we take this idea of PB and apply it to our other aspects of our lives? We could teach children to strive for their personal best in their school work. If you can write a good quality paragraph once, you can repeat that every time you write one. If you can do a math problem by showing your work and solving it step by step, you can give each new problem you come across the same effort.

We will always feel defeated if we try to measure up to others. We will even feel defeated if we measure up to only ourselves sometimes. Trying our best is all that we can ask of anyone. I try to strive for my personal best in all aspects of my life. It doesn’t mean that I do anything with perfection. PB is not about perfection, it is about effort. It is about trying. I think that is all we can do in this life. We need to try our best, learn from our mistakes, compete against ourselves and come out on top.


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