run your own race
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Highlights
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Run your own race, as in: you set certain standards for yourself, and you focus on meeting them. When you meet them, you’re proud of yourself. When you don’t, you urge yourself to try harder. You don’t question your standards based on what anyone else is doing. You don’t look over at someone else’s race and think, I’m doing a bad job because you’re going faster. You just focus on your own pace.
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This is incredibly freeing, because it means I judge myself by my own standard of behavior in every relationship, and not by the other person’s response. I’ve noticed that most people seem to overly fixate on other people’s responses:
- you have to center your own behavior. How did you act? If you have no way to judge that’s not based on obsessively analyzing other people’s micro-reactions to you, you probably don’t know who you are in the absence of someone else’s verdict.
- You don’t know what is good and beautiful outside of what is culturally dictated to be good and beautiful. We believe that desire is mimetic, but we forget that the people who inspire real desire are always people who are redefining it—who give us something new to look at, allow us to escape groupthink.
- There’s nothing more powerful than separating signal from noise, spotting a phenomenon no one else has recognized yet. But to do that you need your own separate thoughts.