Competing against yourself

A reminder

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

–Desiderata¹

[Epistemic status: not especially original good advice, re-written as a reminder to myself. It might be a good reminder for you too.]

It’s important to mostly compete with yourself and not with other people. 

I say “mostly”. In small doses, competing with other people can be motivating and even fun. Competing with other people at least somewhat is also inevitable, human psychology being what it is. 

Still, I think there’s a mindset that should be avoided: constantly taking other people as your primary standard of evaluation. It’s far better to take your past self as your standard. Why? 

Other people don’t share your goals, they don’t have the same strengths and weaknesses, and they don’t face the same obstacles as you do. So they are not the relevant benchmark. Should you be competing with Scott Alexander on blogging output? Probably not. He’s a genius with graphomania. Should you feel bad that other people are better at forecasting than you are? Not unless you actually care about forecasting. Should you be ashamed if you struggle more with giving talks than your colleague? Nope - maybe they have more experience or a luckier disposition for it.

When I compete with other people about writing, I can get frustrated and intimidated because I’m not as prolific and fascinating as other writers. This might make me stop doing something that I do enjoy and care about.

Even worse, competitiveness can make me start doing things I don’t enjoy and care about. For example, because it seems to be what smart people in my professional circles do, I might start leaving meticulous LessWrong comments even if it’s not what I personally value doing. The “different goals” factor is especially important for this reason: you can waste a lot of time if you compete with people who have different goals.

If you take other people as your standard, you will meme yourself into doing things you don’t even really care about. 

People who went to ‘elite’ schools are especially prone to being prestige-sniped into doing things that they don’t actually value. Brian Timar has a wonderful essay about how he got three years [!] into a PhD in physics before realizing that he didn’t actually care about physics:

As an undergraduate, I was not particularly passionate about quarks, quasars, or quantum mechanics, but I was academically very competitive, and once I’d settled on physics as my major I determined to place myself at the top of my class. I did so by throwing myself into the hardest classes and putting in the hours required to ace the tests.

This dynamic is extremely common in academia more generally. A friend of mine had an epiphany two years into grad school that he was doing philosophy almost entirely for praise: early in undergrad he got feedback that he was good at philosophy, and he just kept competing at higher and higher levels, all the way into a PhD. He had not stopped to consider whether he liked philosophy itself.

Competing with other people is also psychologically painful. At virtually every coarse-grained measure of your life, you will be failing badly relative to someone else. Scrolling through facebook: this friend has beautiful children and an idyllic family life; this friend is writing one novel per year; this friend has gotten a tenure-track job. To make things worse, we tend to construct a composite competitor who has all of these accomplishments. You start to wonder: why haven’t I written a novel, raised a family, travelled the world, done a PhD, and started my own company? 

Competing with others can be particularly harmful in creative work. When you see other people publishing two papers a year and getting fancy jobs, you can start to panic. Why am I not publishing more? Am I falling behind? What’s wrong with me? But nothing is less conducive to doing good creative work than this panicked, rushed feeling. Creative work takes time, patience, and a certain kind of playfulness.

Earlier I said that you fail relative to other people on “coarse-grained” measures of success. In contrast, “fine-grained” measures of success are the very particular things that you actually want to do with your life: the exact things you want to prioritize given your talents. No one else shares your exact goals and your exact starting point. On appropriately fine-grained measures, the only person you even can compete with is yourself. 

So not only are you a psychologically healthier standard of comparison, you are also the objectively correct standard.

1. Is this poem a bit cringe? Yes. Is that a bad thing? Nope:

The Sacred Practice of Cringe Equanimity