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In my youth I was fiercely competitive.  I used to do the best I could to be the best.  As a target shooter I can recall in searing detail pulling in a really good score one day, better than most people in the team could normally get in a competition event, and I thought, “Yes!  This time it’ll be me who gets the sliver spoon!”  A spoon was traditionally the reward for the highest score of the day.  I was really looking forward to using it to stir my tea, to showing off.

At the end of the event I discovered that I was not the only one who’d had a good day.  Rod Murphy, a comparative newcomer to the team, got the spoon. I remember almost nothing else about Rod except that he got the spoon.

As years went by I noticed this would happen a lot.  Just when I got close to excellence in something someone else would come along and do better.  For example, I struggled to produce my first articles in academic journals and -bang- someone else I knew produced one a week later in a better journal. Was there no way I could get ahead?  So I cursed my luck.

Then, I’m not really sure how, I realized what was going on.  Quality in anything breeds more quality.  Rather than seeing life as a scramble in which I had to be at the top of the heap, I could, if I so wished, see it as a rising tide of excellence that carried me and all others forward.  If I did well, that was nice.  But better yet was the sense that there were lots of others doing good things also, and that the overall standard was rising all the time.  Now that was something to be grateful for.

I stopped envying others their successes quite so much around that time.  And since then I’ve noticed that whenever I manage to do something relatively well that others are all around me, also working effectively, right in step. 

And that is why we must always try our best, because somehow, through the alchemy of life, it means that others are enabled to produce their best too, whether we know them or not.