WHAT ARE YOU COMPETING AGAINST?
Competing with people is pointless. Especially when you’re competing with factors in your mind that can have an actual impact on your happiness and success.
What are we truly competing against?
FEAR
The tricky thing about fear is that it means well but it’s overbearing. Fear is Sam’s (Squid) Mom from Rocket Power or that episode of “Hey Arnold” where Sid became a germaphobe. Fear wants to protect you by removing any and all experiences from you which doesn’t help any growth in any form. You could have a simple fear of failure and fear will protect you from failure and feeling hurt by convincing you doing nothing at all is the best option but by doing nothing at all you’re hurting yourself too and fear doesn’t realize or tries to rationalize that. It’s objective is to protect you from pain by any means necessary. We compete against fear by trying to get it to understand that everything will be okay and even if it won’t be we’ll still be okay. Fear fights hard against collaboration. So when you try to calm yourself in the face of fear and anxiety you’re going to be met with a good amount of resistance. You’re competing against each other for the belief of what’s best for you. Put your arm around fear and calmly remind it that you’re the driver. Let it sit back and ride.
TIME
The thing about creativity or life is that time is the ruler. What you’ve heard a 1000 times is true. Time is the ultimate luxury. When you’re building anything your competition isn’t anyone else. Your competition is time. You’re gonna lose the battle against time regardless so the game is rigged but the moral victory that you can obtain is making your time count. Having a feeling that you really used your time the way you wanted to. This is why I praise people who always use their time with a great deal of intention. They understand it’s blessing and that it could be taken away from any of us at any given moment.
STRESS
Stress comes the most when we try to take on every battle on our own. Sometimes we put it on ourselves and take on more than we can handle. Sometimes it’s not our fault and situations we never asked for get placed on our plate and we deal with them. Everyone competes against stress differently. Me, personally I just stop giving a fuck and I leave it where it is. I don’t like putting unnecessary pressure on myself nor do I like people doing it to me. Stress usually comes when our expectations are high or when we think we have all the answers and stress hit us wit a mean ass 3 piece wit a side of fries. The best way to compete against stress is building a healthy routine of your mind, body, and spirit. That’s your foundation that will be hard to break when stress comes in your life. So if your foundation of eating clean, sleeping good, meditating properly is already in place then you’ll only have to deal with stress on the surface level. You’ll be hard to break.
EMOTIONS
These are your tools for judgement. Emotions are how we judge things. You can help how you feel. Seems unreal but you truly can. If I truly acted on my emotions all the time I’d be in prison a long fucking time ago. Especially being a black man. I compete with my emotions everyday. How you compete with emotions is that you understand how emotions really work. I’m a very emotional person but I am a controlled person. I know how to control the line of rationality and being emotional. Emotions purpose is to help us with reasoning, feel experiences, and grasp the understanding of how other humans feel. I’ve said it before. Not all of your emotions are valid. It’s a fact that helps me do what I do creatively. People think that all their feelings are absolute and when they find out they’re not they get sad, depressed, and unstable. You won’t always feel the way you feel but it’s up to us to determine if that future feeling will be positive or negative.
EXPECTATIONS
If you want your heart to hurt then expect things without mindfulness. You’re always up against expectations. What your family expect of you. What your job expect from you. Your significant other expects from you. The key to winning against expectations is to not give a fuck about what anyone thinks when you win or lose. Your win is your win. Your loss is your loss. You gotta carry them so try your best without thinking about what people expect from you. What some people may think are expectations from family members for example is actually disguised as forms of manipulation. They try to force what worked for them on you. They try to live their dream through you and it’s not your dream at all.
Living without expectations is impossible. We all think about the future. I believe we compete against our attachment to expectations and if we get too attached the more pain will come our way and give us a reality check. You win against expectations by being okay with going in another direction. If things don’t work will you be okay starting another journey? That’s how you deal with expectations. In some cases when you accept things for what they are and you reroute yourself, things change.
COMFORT
That “thing” that you said you were going to start but you never did for whatever reason is an example of you losing to your comfort zone. Being comfortable feels great but sets you back almost more than anything. Being comfortable doesn’t prepare you for the storm of being uncomfortable. That’s why it’s difficult for people to lose weight or eat healthy. Your body has gotten comfortable to the unhealthy routine and it keeps relapsing when you’re trying to change it. You know how hard it is to work for yourself? You will never be comfortable. Even if you’re successful with building a business you won’t be comfortable. You mentally have to prepare yourself to be comfortable with discomfort and that’s how you win against comfortability. Me putting in 15 hour work days for 2 straight weeks for my brand is not comfortable for me but I’m okay with it because it’s what I love to do. Life already hard as fuck so just jump off the cliff (figuratively speaking). What’s the worst that can happen if you leave your comfort zone? You’re human and you have the ability to adapt. You’ll never progress if you always side bet. You gotta gamble. There’s no map to this shit but if you have the faith and belief of “I’m gonna be alright regardless” you’ll win.
MATERIALISM
Impression. People are materialistic because they want to prove something to people they don’t care for and impress people they don’t care for. Materialism is actually a threat to mental health. It threatens our empathy and relationships with our loved ones. I never met a human that was materialistic and a good person. Materialism turns people into assholes. Materialism make people unlikable. I don’t have a multi media company for followers or popularity, fuck all that. I have one because I love what I do. My purpose can’t be fucked with. Materialism is a threat to your purpose because you place belief in things that leave you emptier than you were after you obtained it. I can’t have any connection to a foreign car. A foreign car won’t bring out the best in you. It won’t bring out the happiest or best version of yourself. You beat materialism by practicing gratitude. Focusing on being a better human being. Focusing on your freedom. People paid you no mind without a lambo so what sense does it make to get a lambo to get people to finally give you attention? Why would you want attention and fake friends? That’s actually worse than being alone. That is bad energy you’re inviting in your world. Quit chasing stuff and chase your purpose. If you catch “Stuff” you’re gonna want more stuff and you’re gonna be on a continuous loop because none of that shit will cure your unhappiness, depression, and narcissism. If you catch your “purpose” you’ll understand that less is more and genuinely be happy with your life and stay the course. You’ll have gratitude and never take life for granted. Focus on the experiences. Not the things.
Peace
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