Page 101 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

can be, there is nothing better than competition. It teaches you the valuable

lesson that no matter how good you are, there is always somebody better than
you are. That’s the lesson in humility you need, the lesson those teachers are
misguidedly trying to teach by eliminating grades. It teaches you that by trying
to beat somebody else, you reach for more inside of yourself. Trying to beat
somebody else simply puts the “game” back into life. If it’s done optimistically,
it gives energy to both competitors. It teaches sportsmanship. And it gives you a
benchmark for measuring your own growth.

The poet William Butler Yeats used to be amused at how many definitions
people came up with for happiness. But happiness wasn’t any of the things
people said it was, insisted Yeats.

“Happiness is just one thing,” he said. “Growth. We are happy when we are
growing.”

A good competitor will cause you to grow. He or she will stretch you
beyond your former skill level. If you want to get good at chess, play against
somebody better at chess than you are. In the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher,
we see the negative effects of resisting competition on a young chess genius
until he starts to use the competition to grow. Once he stops taking it personally
and seriously, the game itself becomes energizing. Once he embraces the
intriguing fun of competition, he gets better and better as a player, and grows as
a person.

I mentioned earlier that I’d heard a report on the radio that there was a Little
League organization somewhere in Pennsylvania that had decided not to keep
score in its games anymore because losing might damage the players’ self-
esteem. They had it all wrong: Losing teaches kids to grow in the face of defeat.
It also teaches them that losing isn’t the same as dying, or being worthless. It’s
just the other side of winning. If we teach children to fear competition because
of the possibility of losing, then we actually lower their self-esteem.

Compete wherever you can. But always compete in the spirit of fun,
knowing that finally surpassing someone else is far less important than
surpassing yourself.

69. Turn your mother down

Psychologist and author M. Scott Peck observes, “To a child, his or her