My point is that everyone will have to deal with not being the best. For the vast majority of people being the best at anything is out of the question, regardless of effort or focus. Even if you are one of the lucky few who can be "the best", it'll only be for a moment in time. All of us age and our capacities fade. Then you're left dealing with the additional burden of having once kissed the sky and now being earthbound like the rest of us.
The whole point of the philosophy is finding something else to focus on other than the (true but depressing) objective rank-ordering of you among your peers. Leaderboards are useless to all but a chosen few.
However, everyone (even the ones that will place on the top of the leaderboards) can benefit from taking their focus off the leaderboard and putting it on their own process and effort (in some sense replacing the comparison to others with a comparison to their yester-selves).
Some things like being able to clearly communicate in writing or even just walking are inherently useful. However, if the benchmark is being able to walk that’s pass fail, what does it matter if your in the 15th percentile or 90th percentile walker? Similarly not everything makes the cut. Judging a RPG wizard by their strength score misses the point.
When someone accepts that splitting their focus isn’t free. Then not learning French and not being on the top 10% of something was also useful. Judging yourself by external rankings in multiple categories is therefore foolish. Having a higher rank in something may be counter productive.
People who judge themselves by external metrics and think higher must be better can become overachievers, but getting depressed about their “failings” is just as problematic. I don’t mean this as a happy go lucky, showing up is worth a prize. I mean it in terms of the evolutionary pressure, body builders make poor marathon athletes.
The rank for strongest person goes in one direction, the rank for weakest person goes the other. To say your behind suggests a preferred and ranked ordering, that’s reasonably true of checkout lines at the grocery store. However it’s not so for total body weight as neither 50lbs nor 500lbs is the ideal adult body weight.
It literally says not to compete with others. If you still see everything as a competition, you're not taking the advice.
And if you're competing on an absurd metric that nobody else even thinks is a competition, like being the heaviest, then you probably have other issues that you need to work on.
Why was their time and effort wasted?
It's missing the fact that a lot of times 80% is good enough. You need to be okay with that and also stop when that is not the thing which you need/want to get to 99%+
Don’t try to be better at everything, get better at the things holding you back and then move on. You don’t need to be the worlds best cook to make lunch, but pick something and hitting the top 10%, 1%, 0.1% or even #1 becomes possible.
I have seen far to many overachievers who break down when they realized the vast majority of their time and effort has been wasted.