Great post Sam! My two cents is to try and compete against yourself: quantify your actions with some set of metrics and loop your measurements of those metrics into a feedback loop of improvement. That way, you never feel left behind and have your improvement cycles interrupted or lost, and you gain a good deal of self-introspection, which is invaluable in a world where people nudge/push you around. Your understanding of yourself has to be the ground truth where all other personality traits, habits, and higher-level tasks evolve from, and these combine to generate high-quality work and personal roadmaps.
> My two cents is to try and compete against yourself
This. With social media so ubiquitous it's hard _not_ to compare yourself to others. I, personally, find internal motivation so much more of a driving force than external motivation. As long as I do better than I did last time, I'll be happy.
For example, if I can improve my 1600 meter run time by 5 seconds, that's a great success for me. And if I'm able to consistently see improvement over time, I'm successful. On the other hand, If I compare my 7m5s 1600m time to my neighbor's 5m30s time I feel terrible. And depending on personality type, seeing such a stark difference between where you currently are and where someone else is, it might deter them from even trying to get better. "I'll never get down to 5m30s, so why should I bother running at all?"
I'm not saying _all_ external comparisons are bad but I think it's important to know when to compare yourself to yourself (to ensure daily incremental progress is being achieved) and when to look up and see where you are relative to others (to see how your incremental progress is summing up in the big picture).
