WINNER TAKE ALL, Part 2
Inherent in the winner take all games I wrote about two weeks ago is the obsession with relative position. Marx wrote that equal housing satisfies everyone but that introducing a palace in a neighborhood of satisfactory housing renders the other houses hated huts. Without trying to discredit Marx or looking to the social implications of this envy, or whatever we choose to call it, the personal consequences of looking at everything in comparison with others are clear. We lose satisfaction, we lose contentment, we lose the possibility of happiness. There will always be someone luckier, richer, better at something than we. If we let that fact bother us, we begin to resent other people, we begin to resent the conditions of our lives, we become unable to function.
If we can avoid looking at relative position and enjoy our own performance, how much better it will be. If we can look inside ourselves and take satisfaction from doing our best, however we perform compared to someone else, how much happier we will be.
So how do we do this? How do we avoid regarding everything we do as a contest, a contest in which only the winner is entitled to rewards, a contest, moreover, in which the loser must regard him or herself as a failure? The question answers itself. It's in our own minds that we win or lose so if we learn to judge success and failure with regard to our own standards of performance, if we learn to compare only with regard to how well we're capable of performing, we will not resent, we will enjoy, we will be happier.
We won't always do as well as we can in our varied pursuits: Carelessness, distraction, inadequate preparation, poor attitudes will sometimes hurt our performances, we will all sometimes look at our behavior and be disappointed in ourselves. Sometimes we will "lose" because we didn't do our best. But our loss will only be with regard to our own internal standards, we won't have anyone to blame but ourselves, we won't resent anyone else. And, gloriously, whatever the world thinks, whatever our relative performance, we will more and more often do our best, we will more and more often win. Then we can really enjoy what we're doing, then we have the possibility of happiness.
Do your best and make doing your best the only relevant comparison. If you can succeed in this way of thinking, you'll be a winner and you'll enjoy the contest.
6-5-00
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