Focus On Yourself, Not Your Competitors

This year has been tough for all of us obviously.  My cycling group rides are a huge part of my normal workout plan, as well as a way to hang out and socialize with friends and like minded people who care about their bodies and health. 

Then March came and poof, they stopped.  As things calmed down a bit I did start riding with a few close friends who I trust once in a while, but the normal large group rides that allow me to test myself against my friends and frenemies were gone. 

Consequently, by mid summer I really didn’t have a good gauge on my fitness like I normally do.  I was getting my workouts in and eating cleaner than ever after going into monk mode.  I felt great, but that can be really deceiving.  Too much solo riding sucks, I can’t push myself as hard as I can as when I’m racing my friends.  And most of my rides were solo rides.

I needed to get into some head to head battles with my riding buddies to really know where I was at.

 

Busting Out

By Labor Day weekend I was done with it.  Facing another weekend of riding alone, I contacted some friends who I hadn’t seen since March.  Turns out they were sick of it too and had planned a century ride for Labor Day!  They wanted to keep it small but I told them “I’m coming, just try to stop me”. 

A “century ride” if you’re not familiar means a 100 mile ride.  I hope I don’t sound too douchy when I say that I can easily ride 100 miles, that’s not a big deal.  The problem is that the friends I was joining are all murderers – they’re normally super-fit and super-fast guys. 

So after I told them I was coming I started freaking out a bit.  I thought “Shit I’m going to ruin this ride for them, I’m going to get dropped and they’re going to have to wait for me”. 

Since we all use Strava, the popular workout app, I was watching their training all year and saw that they were getting in their miles.  “They’ve been hitting it harder than ever in quarantine, this is going to be a painful day.  Normally I can hang with them but not this year, this year’s a mess…”

I was focused on my competitors, and what they had been doing.  It got to me.  Anxiety and dread filled my brain for two days leading up to the ride.

 

Ride Day

When the ride came, I saw how much of a fool I was.  By mile 60 or so I couldn’t help but notice that I was not only keeping up with everyone, I was putting the hurt on a few of them on the hills.  So when a big hill approached at mile 85 or so, I launched an attack, and only two other guys could stay with me. 

I dropped the rest of the group. 

When the ride was over I felt ecstatic, like I could go another 50 easily.  We enjoyed post ride beers and caught up on our summers in quarantine.  It was an amazing day and so good to catch up with friends and go toe to toe like normal times. 

And what did I learn?  A lesson that I should have already learned but am apparently too hard headed to actually put in practice:

To focus on myself.  Not my competitors.

 

I Control Me, Not Them

This has been a tough one for me to put in practice.  For instance, even though my graphic arts business is absolutely killing it, I still sometimes look at the folks making 6 figures doing the same.  I look at their designs and their sales.  Some comparison is impossible to avoid, we humans are wired to compare at some level.  And sometimes comparison is a good thing.

But often it’s just wasted energy and my brain waves would be better spent elsewhere.  I can’t control what they do, or which designs they make.  I can control what I do, and how hard I work at my business. 

How many professional athlete interviews have you seen where they say the same thing? 

Reporter – “So you have to face Team X next week and they’re on a roll, what do you think about them?” 

Athlete Response – “I don’t focus on that, I just focus on me and my team and we keep doing what we do… blah blah blah…”

It’s a trite and robotic response, but here’s the thing – it’s also the best response and probably true!  They focus on their own training, their situation. 

Sure, a football player might have to study an opposing teams plays and strategies, but they’re not focusing on how many 40 yard dash drills the team has done or how much the linebacker is putting up on the bench.  

 

Focus On Your Journey To FI

What does this have to do with your money? 

There are now so many voices out there in the personal finance space it seems to easy and almost inevitable to focus on others.  That could manifest as a classic ‘keep up with the joneses‘ angle of wanting what they have, or it could just have you questioning your financial habits and portfolio as compared to someone else’s. 

You’re not them, you are you.  Personal finance is personal, so learn the basics and focus internally. 

Additionally, they are not your competitors.  And if you see your financial life in comparison to others as competition, you really need to try to re-frame that.  There’s no Vegas betting room with everyone’s net worth up on a big screen for all to see.  No one has 2-1 odds on you accumulating more wealth than your favorite blogger. 

To be clear, I’m not writing this from a high-falutin’ place of having it all figured out. 

I definitely struggle with focusing on others too much, in more than cycling.  Hopefully I’ll take the experience from my century ride to heart, and realize that what I did all summer for my fitness was really good. 

I focused on myself on all those lonely solo rides, and it was enough.