Day 204: Anything you can do I can do better

In capitalism, we are taught from a young age that competing with others is something that makes us stronger, and that we have to compete with people to get the best prize. In the workplace, in our families and relationships, we compete with others to "be the best" and win above someone else.

So we are warlike creatures in nature, and we have to change this warlike behaviour through the years to become supportive for life instead of destructive. You can see that sometimes even when we are working on something together with a person or persons, our mind is so geared towards competition, that we will fight with someone that we are supposed to be working with.

I have seen this myself recently - I am used to doing things myself, but I am also effective at working in teams, but recently I was competing in my mind with someone that I have been working on a project with. This person is new to the project like me, while others have been working on it for years.

So in my mind because this person joined this project at the same time as me, with the same level of experience, my mind was competing to make "the first big impression" on this project before this other new person.

Then while working on this new project, I could see that my mind was lacking concentration and focus on the tasks at hand, because I'm wasting moments thinking about beating the other person to make an impact - so in my mind it was constant ego fuck with thoughts like "come on I can't be beaten to make an impact by this guy, I have to be the hero before him".

Then later in the day, I started laughing at myself for a moment, because I could see how my pre-programming to compete was coming through and compromising my input and participation in this project.
 
You will notice that this competitiveness can come up when you see someone of equal capabilities, or someone where you can see similarities in your character to theirs, and they are working on something that you are also working on, or they have something you have, or are aiming for the same thing as you - there are many scenarios I can point to through the years where I have followed this pattern of behaviour.

So this competitive "anything you can do i can do better" thought process, is never something that will assist me or anyone else in living whats best for all, so I take self-responsibility to change this pattern of competitiveness, to release it, so that I am stable when interacting with others regardless of the scenario or something about the person.

If you have noticed a situation where you were competing with someone recently, then join me next week as I continue to walk this point.