About Competition

Success is not always what it seems. Photo:© R.Morgan

I have long believed that the only true competition in this world is with yourself.

We live in a society where people are much too concerned with what others are doing and thinking, or might think.

Comparison with others is meaningless and only brings distress, and yet in our society we do it all the time.

“The next door neighbours have a swimming pool so we must get one,” even though we’re afraid of water and never go swimming.

“My girlfriends all have tattoos so I must get one,” even though it’s not really my thing.

“Bill has just got a promotion. Isn’t it time that I got one?”

Never mind that Bill sold his soul in the process.

The next time you look at someone else and feel envious, ask yourself how much you really know about the person.

He may be driving the expensive car you have always wanted, but is it paid for or just bought on credit?

He may have an incredibly beautiful wife, but perhaps in private they haven’t got two words to say to each other.

The thing is, everybody is different.

We all had individual experiences growing up, we all have our own agenda.

Don’t assume someone is successful because he or she is “successful” in the eyes of society.

We do not know what has been given up along the way or what is truly going on inside that person.

That is why comparisons are meaningless, and competition with others a waste of time.

It’s like comparing an apple with an orange.

On the other hand, competition with yourself will help you to develop and make each day a new beginning.

You can compare where you are now with where you were last week, last month, last year…

“I can do fifty press ups now but last year, I could only do twenty.”

“I can play a guitar reasonably well whereas a year ago, I couldn’t play at all.”

“I couldn’t do this at work, but now I can.”

You can look at concrete elements in your life and see progress.

The most important thing in this competing with yourself, though, and the main reason for the existence of this website,
is NOT TO MAKE LIFE AN ENDURANCE TEST.

Give yourself days off.

Allow yourself to have fun.

Frustrated that you can’t master that programme. Leave it and come back to it another day.

Can’t do what you wanted to do. Start again tomorrow.

The joy is in the doing, not in boasting about it the next day.

And don’t be put off if people say, as they have to me over the years:

“I don’t understand why you aren’t further ahead in your career.”

(Replace “career” with whatever applies to you!)

This is a meaningless judgement.

They do not know who you are or what you have gone through in life.

Their definition of success is almost certainly different from yours.

Sometimes the people who think they know you the best (parents, siblings, even close friends) don’t have a clue who you really are.

So do your own thing.

Run your own energy.

Leave the bleating to the others.

And see what happens.

Love

Richard

Start Before You’re Ready

I saw this wonderful video by Marie Forleo on YouTube:

Can’t Seem To Get Started? This One Idea Could Change Your Life

Never a truer piece of advice.

And well worth spending the seven minutes to watch.

I’ve already talked about Marie TV in a previous post:

Performance Tips (No, Not That Kind…)

As I mentioned before, the channel is really targeted at entrepreneurs and business activities, but many of the pieces of advice are relevant to any sphere of activity.

Marie is quite a character, has a big following with her YouTube channel and is fun to watch.

A little personal story here.

Almost exactly a year ago, I brought out my second full album of original music, MY TITANIC.

Now bringing out the first album, THE LESS YOU DO, in 2010, had been somewhat of an uncomfortable experience. I’d gone into the studio with eight musicians and an arranger and it had all got rather complicated.

So for the second album, I wanted to go a different direction and I was thinking about trying to record some tracks on my own, but I didn’t feel ready.

I was wondering what to do when I discovered a remarkable and now unfortunately defunct site called CrowdAudio which allowed artists to run mixing competitions.

As it happened, I’d recorded a ballad with just a piano-voice arrangement a fews days previously, so I decided to put it in and see what happened.

147 mixes and much listening later, I’d discovered the engineer with whom I went on to record the whole album. 3ee happens to live in Romania.

Now I wasn’t at all sure about recording the album on my own at home. But I liked the initial mix and I thought I could maybe try to record a few more songs before getting stuck and hiring session musicians in to a studio. Although I worried that the song arrangements would be too thin and the instrumental playing too weak, I persuaded myself to give it a shot.

So I started recording the album and sending the results off to Romania.

I decided to get each song mixed and mastered before moving on to the next.

Gradually, the number of completed songs built up.

And finally, I reached a tipping point where I said to myself, “What the hell, let’s do the whole thing like this.”

And the interesting thing was that the experience of recording at home generated new songs as I went along, songs that perhaps I would not have written otherwise.

In the end, many of the songs that I had initially wanted to record didn’t get on the album because I was enjoying the process of writing songs from scratch and recording them, all within the space of a few days. Some of them really sped through the “factory.”

Did I feel ready to record the whole album by myself before starting?

Absolutely not.

Is the result perfect?

No.

Could the arrangements be better?

Probably.

But it doesn’t stop me from being proud of the album and grateful for the experience.

And as Marie points out in her video, there’s really only one crime.

Everybody has to begin somewhere. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has to change things around.

The only real crime is not starting at all.

Love

Richard

The Start of a Backlash?

I thought this was an interesting article on BBC News recently:

Some cafes are banning wi-fi to encourage conversation

I’m relieved to see that the fact that everybody’s noses seem to be stuck to their screens all day long at last seems to bother some people.

It’s no substitute for real human interaction as another article from BBC Newsbeat suggests:

US Psychologists Claim Social Media Increases Loneliness

Personally, I’d like to see more places that are wi-fi, laptop and mobile phone free.

It really is time that people reclaimed their lives and started returning to the real world.

The mobile phone is a tool over which many people have no control whatsoever.

If you do not master a tool, then you become its slave.

Other tools that people are often enslaved to are money and TV.

Same thing applies.

Ask yourself honestly:

Do I have control over my mobile phone/money/TV or does it have control over me?

And if your answer is that you don’t have control over these things:

TV and mobile phone:
Discover the off button and practise using it.
Start real conversations with real people in front of you.
Do not reply to the phone when you are already in a conversation with a real person.
Try looking at the world around you. It’s full of beauty.

Money:
Try being thankful for the money that you already have.
Try sitting down and working out how much money you really need.
Try evaluating the real cost of obtaining the money you earn.
Try giving some away and see how it feels.

Good luck in all your endeavours.

Have a great week.

Love

Richard