Being successful without being the best

Many people think of success in terms of winning, and of being the best. This is not necessarily so—and thinking so can be damaging to our personal development.

One of the things that can hold us back from success is a misunderstanding of the word “success” itself. It’s a subjective word which has strong connotations of perfection—which is in itself a subjective word—and of being the “best” at something. It also conjures up images related to “winning”. When we think of success we tend to think of someone holding a cup aloft after beating everyone in a tennis or golf tournament.

But is this really success?

Not necessarily.

There’s certainly something to be said for being the best, for winning the tournament and holding the cup aloft. It can give a real—though usually temporary—high. But we can be successful without winning anything, and without being the best. What we need to realize is that success can be and often is a very personal thing and to not realize this is to misunderstand the basis of success itself.

Another conception of success

The misunderstanding of what constitutes success is based on the misunderstanding that we have to work to other people’s goals and values. We can think that if someone isn’t satisfied until they win a competition that we have to think the same way. But this is not true in the slightest. We can think what we like, and take what we like from our experiences and efforts. We may even begin to do something knowing that we will never be the best, but still end up with a great deal of satisfaction and sense of achievement.

For instance, say you start to practice a martial art. You might find yourself training with some people who really good, maybe world class. Even when you begin the training, you know instinctively that can never be one of the “best” because of that fact that you aren’t going to put in the time needed to become the best. Maybe you have other commitments.

But is that a reason to not practice at all? After a year or so you might become pretty good at that martial art compared to how you were when you began—which was probably useless. You might never hold a trophy, but personally see your progress as a great achievement, and the benefits of that training might well be enormous. If you had looked at the others in the practice hall and said to yourself: “I’ll never be as good as that” you would have missed out on a great opportunity for personal development.

Personal success

If we concentrate on the fact that we might never be the best, we miss great chances to do interesting things and get a sense of achievement that we got what we wanted from the experience—which is a form of success in itself, if not the only true meaning of success.

If we carried this “holding back because I can’t be the best” type of thinking to its logical conclusion we would never do anything. Imagine not eating anything because you can’t eat as much as someone else or never going for a walk because someone can walk faster or longer than you can. We’d all live pretty poor lives.

Success is whatever goal you want it to be. It doesn’t matter if you are not the best at it. The only thing that is important is that you have improved. What does it matter if you’re not the fastest kid on the block, as long as you can go faster now than you did before?

By refusing to do anything unless we can become perfect at it—or as perfect as it’s possible to be—we cut ourselves off from many of life’s useful experiences and stop ourselves from experiencing personal growth. And the strange thing is that by concentrating on our own success goals we can often become better than we envisaged or ever imagined.

Today, think about things you might try to do if you didn’t have to be the best at it. Write down something you might like to try, even if just for the experience. Would you try it if you were just allowed to experience it without having to make excuses for not being the “best”? Give it a try. You have nothing to lose but your fear of imperfection.

Have an imperfect day!