You already know the answer.
Who are you competing against?
Who is your greatest competitor?
Who are you always competing against?
You.
But it’s not you.
You aren’t competing against yourself.
You are competing against an imagined, not real version of yourself. That person is still you, but it’s not you. It’s fiction. It’s unrealized.
That person, the person that exists in fantasy land, is your highest self.
Your competition is with your highest self.
You are fighting with your imaginary highest self to make it real. To make your highest self you. The actual person. The one who breathes, who walks, who talks, who eats, who conquers, who struggles, who sleeps, who imagines.
You can imagine your highest self. It’s easy. You know who your highest self is.
But the highest self isn’t a target, it’s not a destination, it’s not some goal.
It is a path.
One you walk, continuously. One you scrap and violently torment with.
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
Scratch that. Your real-life highest self begins at the end of your comfort zone.
Is your highest self lying on a beach in the Caribbean, having grapes fed to them, basking in the comfort of life, merely watching as the Earth does another 360 degree spin?
You already know the answer.
You are competing to make your highest self real. Right now, and forever. With each present moment.
Does your highest self curse someone out?
Does your highest self feel hatred toward another human?
Does your highest self eat properly?
Does your highest self love yourself and every piece of the world unconditionally?
You can turn to yourself at any moment and ask, “What would my highest self do?”
You already know the answer. It then becomes a matter of whether you want to lose the battle and keep your highest self fictitious and imagined, or whether you want to make your highest self you.
To keep your highest self a fantasy, you can often choose pleasure. Cheap, easy, comforting pleasure.
Or you can choose the path. You can choose to keep walking it. Over and over again.
Have you ever had a really really good day? A day where you woke up on time, you got a bunch of stuff done, you made progress on the things you wanted to make progress on, you smiled, you laughed, you felt a certain energy about yourself?
That was a day where you were the champion. That was a day you walked the path. There is only one champion each day, only one champion each moment. It is always your highest self, it’s whether the champion is real or fiction. It’s whether the champion is you or the imagined you. That’s your competition. That’s your competitor.
You can feel when you lose. You know when you lose. There’s an energy of defeat that pervades your soul, your mind, and your heart.
But why fight to make your highest self real?
Because you hate the pain of losing more than you like the joy of winning, but more importantly, the journey of the path is the greatest thing you can possibly experience in this lifetime. What’s better than that?
You can keep a scoreboard, you vs your imagined highest self. When you make your highest self real, that’s a point for you. When you choose to lose and keep your highest self imaginary, that’s a point for the other team.
The best news is… you can blow that scumbag out. Every. Damn. Day. The battle is won with each decision you make to take your highest self out of the fairy tale and into yourself. You can be your highest self whenever you want. But you have to fight. It is a war. It is uncomfortable, it is not easy, it can be painful. But losing always hurts more.
Your mind will attempt to make rationalizations. Your mind will come up with fake reasons that allow you to be weak and do something you respect yourself less for without feeling guilty about it.
That is your imaginary highest self fighting back. Your imaginary highest self wants to keep itself imaginary, it wants to win; rationalizations are one of its strongest tactics to do so.
Procrastination is another one. You see, your imaginary highest self doesn’t like feeling itself. It doesn’t like when it is made real, because that means it loses. Your imaginary highest self will tell you to do it later, to opt for something more pleasurable, to push it back to another day. When you listen, you lose. When you keep your imaginary highest self imaginary, you lose. You win by making your highest self real, right now.
You already know your highest self. You know the path. Your imaginary highest self knows your highest self too, and it wants to keep that self imaginary. You are fighting against it. You are fighting to make your highest self real.
It is you vs your imaginary highest self.
You can win whenever you want. Fight. Keep score.
But don’t just win.
Make your fictitious highest self cower in defeat. Stand triumphantly over them and pity them for even thinking they had a chance. You’re walking the path, and they can’t do anything about it. Laugh at their pathetic attempts to put you off your stride.
Life is a game.
You can win whenever you want. You already know the answer.
The fight starts now.