My reply to another similar comment:

I think there must be some misunderstanding.

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).

So you're replacing an external leaderboard with an internal leaderboard. With different versions of yourself on it.

That's arguably worse than competing with other people, because with other people there is always the excuse of different contexts and conditions, while with yourself it's only you to blame if you don't come up on top.

Which, coincidentally, is what the original article is about. I suggest a reread and a bit of meditation about it.

First, I'm not looking for excuses for poor performance, and I don't want my kids doing that either. You screw up then own it. It's okay. You don't have to be perfect, no one is. But don't be a coward and hide from your own limitations.

Second, I think you're glossing over the part about process-oriented goals.

If one stays stuck on results-oriented goals, then your comment is pretty much on point. It doesn't matter who I'm competing with, I'll have bad days.

But with process-oriented goals, the focus switches how you do what you're doing, and that's something purely in your control.

To put it in exercise terms, you won't always be able to lift more than you did yesterday or run faster than you did 5 years ago--but you can always actually get off the coach and do it, you can always focus on your form, you can always push for that last rep or work hard into the last sprint.

It's really about an internal focus PLUS a process-oriented approach. Not just one or the other.

You first need to follow their process.

You realize, it's not working, following what others recommend for you.

So you follow your process.

You realize, your process is shit too, but you can at least amend it.

You iterate on this, until you reach the center, where you give up. You follow NO-PROCESS.

You retreat, from the world, into yourself.

Into yourself, from the world, you don't, follow, you lead, yourself.

You struggle to lead, others.

That fails.

So you continue. Not because virtue. Not because vice.

You need to be of service, to make money, to survive, you need others.

You find relation, a straw.

Years pass.

Decades pass.

Are you here yet?

You have a, silent voice, only few can hear.

Every word counts, 10 and 20 times.

Only then it can matter, more than the noise pollution around.

Whispering.

You tend to people who seek the better, version of themselves, the unborn you can show them.

It's impossible.

So you do it today.

Every day.

For the rest of days.

I think focusing on the process of self-improvement is still focusing on success in disguise. The root problem is that Western culture ties happiness to success instead of community, and it's hard to shake off (despite the obvious misery it causes) because everyone around still expects you to follow it.

I 100% believe in "success" and the will to power--and I want my kids to succeed, full stop. I make no excuses.

It's part of my value system, and I don't hide from it. I'm a second generation immigrant, and on my visits back to India, I've seen what real poverty looks like.

I don't mean any offense in this, but here it is as plainly as I can say: The idea that "success" isn't crucially important in life is just wrong. I see it as coming from a softness that I associate with participation trophies and the general wimpification of America.

I very much ascribe to G. Michael Hopf's philosophy of “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

The ability to succeed is essential. It's the ability set a goal and accomplish it. That ability is totally separate from the nature of the goal. That goal can be making a billion dollars or it can be building a neighborhood community group.

If I had to guess--and I don't know you well enough to do anything but guess--you're confusing America's value of extreme individualism and a proper focus on internal control and self-improvement in order to be able to succeed.

I disagree about ignoring the leaderboards. Rather than ignoring it, accept the fact that you are not the best.

By ignoring the leaderboard you will have no clue if you are improving or not. The only way to know that for sure is to see how you compare to others. For instance I took up chess, and I can easily see if I improve when my ELO rises. If I didn't have ELO or leaderboards, I'd have no idea. I can never judge my improvement accurately if I can't compare it with others.

And I'd rather say I'm strong enough to be okay with not being the best, as opposed to having to pretend that others and leaderboards don't exist. It seems like this strategy to not compare oneself to others is just turning your head to an issue, because you can't handle it.

There's a very subtle distinction here, and you're right, I didn't articulate it well.

I'm not advocating ignoring the leaderboards (especially for things like chess where they're essential to determining skill).

But you don't focus on the leaderboard. It's not the center of your world--just one data point in a complex web of feedback.

To take the chess example, sitting there and saying "I'm 1063rd and I want to be better" is barely a start. You have to do a lot of evaluation of your internal strengths and weaknesses as a chess player: do you get bored/hyperaggressive? Do you get too cautious? Do you lose focus after X hours?

Then address those with a process in order to move up on the leaderboard. If you define "success" as executing that process, as opposed to winning the game, that's the ticket to both feeling good about yourself regardless of the result AND winning more games over time.

It feels like the leaderboard is still very present for you because of the huge effort and drive you're putting into ignoring it. At least that's the way it comes across to me in your comment. I think the core point of the article is to be a bit more Zen about it, and behave as if it doesn't exist. Moreover, I don't really think any "objective rank-ordering of you among your peers", which you seem to think does exist in a very real way, is actually meaningful. Perhaps an extension of the post would be that anything you can objectively rank yourself on is going to be a very narrow, unhelpful thing to consider.

First, ambitious people will find ways to figure out if they're succeeding. There are good ways and bad ways.

Second, objective rank ordering does exist. You can deny it or dismiss it, but it's there:

- Who's fitter? - Who's prettier? - Who can run/swim/bike farther? - Who makes more money? - Who got in to a "better" school / got the better job / got promoted faster? - Who's got more friends?

Then, the biggest zinger of them of all: who has more status?

Humans may never know the entire leaderboard, but we're exceeding good at knowing our local neighborhood on these kinds of ordering systems.

You can say that these things "don't matter", but to a vast fraction of humanity, they do matter. And as social animals, I'd argue that humans are more or less programmed to care about these things. Maybe not everyone, but imo, social status is core driver of human behavior, just like hunger and sex. And status is all about rank ordering.

We're talking at cross-purposes. I don't really have much of an argument with what you're saying, but again, the idea of the post is that it's better if you can find a way not to do that at all. It's hard, and can take years, but it can be done.

I don't like the post since it starts with a false premise. It's pretending that reality is one way, and it's only okay this way. Rather than telling yourself that "you are not behind" you should accept the fact that you are behind, but it's okay and the only productive thing here to do is to give your best. And the saying "you are exactly where you are supposed to be" is non sensical. Who or what "supposes" where you are?

For better or worse, we are constantly ranking ourselves against others. I'm not sure it's possible to opt out of this. If the author of this article didn't care what other people thought, why would he publish a blog? Even if all you value is equanimity, you'll compare yourself to people embodying it. True detachment is basically an ideal, religious state.

If you fail to acknowledge the part of you that ranks yourself, it often leads to poorly masked jealousy. Like thinking everyone who makes more money than you is greedy, everyone who is smarter than you is pretentious. Better to notice that part of yourself. It doesn't have to rule you completely but it's there.

Maybe one way out is to change the metric you are comparing.

That overachiever neighbor with 3 kids he rarely sees, the trophy wife that wants another gucci handbag and the porsche he drives hastily to the next meeting? Does he have more money? Sure. Is he more happy? Hardly. If the happiness and relaxation metric are what counts then me bindge watching netflix a lazy saturday morning wins 10x over that guy rushing to the airport to make it to his business class flight to Paris.

This is super interesting to me.

Several comments to this thread show that the poster is mixing up the will to power with a specific value system.

The will to power--and the skills to go with it--are a pure good in my mind. It's the stuff let makes babies get up and learn to walk. It's the curiosity that makes kids ask "why?" about everything in the world. It's the fire in humanity that let us put 7+ Billion on this little blue planet while generating amazing standards of living for so many of them.

That will to power can be aimed at whatever target you choose. If Porshe's and Gucci bags and trophy wifes, okay. It can just as easily be a good-paying job that puts a roof over your head and feeds your family, while leaving you plenty of time to be present in everyone's life. It can easily be starting a charity that feeds the homeless or shelters battered women.

The will to power--and the skills that go with it--are the ability to shape your world in to whatever you want. There's nothing in there that forces you to pick ugly shapes.

> Is he more happy?

Even if he is, it's not like happiness is a zero-sum game for humanity.

I don't see the difference between the posts? Both of them says that you should be fine with being behind. One lays out the facts more explicitly while the other is more philosophical, some prefer one of them over the other but it is good to have both.

The post is just trying to help people cope with knowing that they're behind. It's not a good approach to life.

Who doesn't want to win at what they do? I think this is more about picking the game you want to play.

Also, if you "know you're perfectly okay right where you are" why would you want to change?

"Win at what you do" is one of those rah-rah go-getter mindset phrasing that has infected the Western world. Do you "win" at being happy? Having fulfilling relationships? Is everything a game/competition, to be measured with winning and losing?

Let me rephrase: doesn't everyone want to win the game they choose to play? If you don't then maybe you picked the wrong game.

If you choose to strive for a fulfilling relationship, and you succeed in achieving that then yes, you've won.

I only use the analogy of life as a game because it resonates with me. There are other ways to phrase what I'm saying.

This is one of the reasons I love to ski.

Sometimes, when the conditions are just right and my legs are in good shape and my mind is in the right place, I have one of those amazing ski runs that is just perfection. And it’s great.

But other times, I also have fun. And I don’t end up with a score telling me how I did on each turn or anything like that.

I log most of my trips on Strava, mostly as a way to stay in touch with friends around the world, but intentionally avoid the run-counting and speed-tracking gizmos, to help preserve this “did I enjoy myself or not?” metric.

Relatedly, I’ve intentionally slowed down when skiing on lift access. The ride down is more fun than the ride up, ans the lift is a fixed cost. So I get a better ratio of enjoyment by turning more, and thus sitting on the lift less.

I choose to play fighting games, and I get my current fix from Dark Souls - an asymmetric fighting game. I enjoy winning, and I structure my play around intentional practice so that I can improve.

But I don't want to win. This is an important nuance.

Do you know what winning means? It means the game is over. It means there's no more challenge, no more adversary. It means boredom and purposelessness.

Rather than winning, what I want is to fight. Focusing on the outcome of the fight is missing the forest for the trees - the fun is in the conflict, in the struggle with your opponent(s), in the instinctive collaboration with your occassional teammate.

In the glory of the defeat, as well as victory. Unless you've got firsthand experience of this, you won't believe how wonderful it feels to get your ass handed to you by a truly superior player.

To put the gaming analogy aside, life will always have its ups and downs. Life will always take you somewhere unexpected. Fixating on outcomes will blind you to opportunities and invite needless suffering into your life.

It really doesn't feel wonderful in fighting games.

A superior player can easily trap you in a corner and take your life down to half or more with a single combo string. It's like playing chess against someone entirely more skilled; everything you try to do gets responded to at a level far above you. There really isn't any "wonderful" about it; you could end up watching a video and getting the same result, for all you could do in the match.

There is no "glory" in this. A lot of the "play to improve" mindset is a result of needing to make a stupid level of effort to win games, with players going on long loss series due to low population and over-skilled players in the brackets they are in. This is why the fighting game genre struggles to get new players in the game at all-you have to work so much to get to where the fun is or to feel good about your efforts.

So game and metagame are important here.

Overall, I agree with your point. This is the reason I don't play those games, or in those ultra-competitive brackets.

I don't think we're necessarily contradicting eachother. I choose to play fighting games for the fight, rather than the victory, and thus tailor my choices within that genre to suit me.

To offer a couple of 'parallel' examples to your own:

Player A is at a significantly higher level than player B, and 'stifles' player B through consistent reads and conditioning. Nothing player B tries works, everything player B does seems to play exactly into player As hands.

This is almost a restatement of your example, except it was a highly rewarding experience for me. In the language of cognitive psychology, it brought about a powerful flow state.

The two key differences: 1.) that the skill imbalance was not too great - just great enough - and 2.) that the nature of the game's design and the players' choices in tactics/playstyles ommitted the more obnoxious elements of combat.

My second parallel example is simply my first, reversed: I am player A, and my opponent is player B.

Everything plays out the same. Interesting, that.

Because implicit in player A's skill is that they are in control of the fight - they can, usually, make things fairly unpleasant and dirty for the opponent. It doesn't take much to push someone past the mental edge, to knock them off balance and keep them there; to destroy their flow state.

Why is player A so restrained? He didn't want to win, he wanted to fight.

Players motivations in games are often what makes the difference between a positive and a negative experience. So we nicely return to the beginning: if you're focused on winning, you're not going to have a good time and neither are the people playing with you.

Yeah, this is you being idiosyncratic. If you look at most people in these situations, they do not get in a flow state from being pummeled, nor do the pummelers restrain themselves to have a fun match.

In example 1, the player often DCs or rage quits, because there's no value in such a matchup. If they see the end of the match, they quickly leave to find one more balanced to their skill. You could have just stayed in training and worked on labbing combos for all the effort you went through.

And labbing is one of the big problems of that genre, where people feel they have to train hard just to have fun.

The second...yeah, no they usually demolish them and move on. A high skilled player also gets little value out of owning someone, and they often smurf in lower ranks for an ego boost. "Watch me stream bronze to grandmaster!"

A lot of this is more people trying to convince people to stick with something despite a lot of negative experiences. Fighting games are seriously at risk of being a dead genre, and a lot of the problems are not easily solvable.

>It really doesn't feel wonderful in fighting games.

It depends on the person. You're right that games that cater to the lowest common denominator and allow casual players occasional wins are way more popular. But for most multiplayer genres there are people that derive most of the satisfaction they get from gaming from playing competitive stuff with a super high skill cap.

I like Arena FPS games like Quake. Most people don't. Some like going for world first raid boss kills in MMOs, most MMO players just want to kill some of the bosses eventually or get some shiny loot without much effort.

I've made peace with the fact that most popular online games cater to casuals. I'm getting older so its hard to justify spending as much time as I used to anyways. I still love intense competition. I'm nowhere near the best in the world and I never could have been, but the pursuit of self improvement is still fun.

It has little to do with casuals imo, the ultra hard stuff drives out the midcore over time too. World firsters will beat in 2 weeks what many players would struggle with over a whole expansion, and you literally can not make difficult content catering to them that isn't impossible to 99% of the playerbase.

The problem is that the high end is absurdly high in skill. Like a casual may be bad, but he is not going to be as bad in relation to the average as a high skilled player will be good. There will always be someone who can beat the toughest content in a game using a guitar hero controller or something.

Competition sucks because of this. The high end often has insane talent and makes something their life; how on earth can average people even exist in an ecosystem like this?

This is to some degree also why real time strategy genre is in a coma and the arena shooter genre is practically dead. Small differences in knowledge and skill manifest in consistent crushing wins that demoralize new players.

It takes a particular personality to enjoy learning these punishing titles and from my personal experience it seems that the way people respond to this form of learning through loss is transferable to other domains outside of games.

Its one thing to deal with rare losses, but a lot of competitive gamers seem really unhappy trying to deal with constant loss and feelings of powerlessness or low status. Its not something you can be average in any more.

I worry those kind of games will eventually mirror rl sports, where we have a professional class and a majority of watchers.

In video games--and life--the only rewards for success are a transient celebration and a harder level.

> Fixating on outcomes will blind you to opportunities and invite needless suffering into your life

I think having an outcome in mind is important as your north star and/or driving force, but I agree about fixating on it.

What? The discussion was about winning with respect to others. You've morphed it and defined winning as achieving one's goals.

Yes, indeed everyone wants to achieve their goals. That's vacuous and tautological, and no one was talking about that.

They can be one in the same.

> Yes, indeed everyone wants to achieve their goals. That's vacuous and tautological, and no one was talking about that

My point is that choosing your goals is important. You might achieve your goals and then realize that you didn't even care about achieving them in the first place.

The "winning with respect to others" seems like a detail to me. It doesn't matter if it's winning with respect to others or yourself, as long as you understand what you're doing and are happy with it and the possible outcomes.

If someone wants to grind away to build a billion dollar company then so be it, as long as they understand what that means.

>doesn't everyone want to win the game they choose to play?

This seems totally backwards. Winning is fun, but you don't choose a game because you like winning it, you choose it because you like playing it. All games can be won, but they all play differently.

no one plays a game to lose all the time, because eventually it stops being fun. If you enjoy a game, but every time you play it you get your ass handed to you, eventually you stop. And eventually over time the game ends up having only the people who meet the skill requirements to be able to have a decent win loss ratio.

You can't be Charlie Brown all the time. Ironically Peanuts is probably one of the original takes on this whole debate; Charlie Brown actually faces a lot of despair over losing. The animated special where he travels to the spelling bee is one of the most painful things I have watched because its so realistic; in the end there really was no answer given to him.

> no one plays a game to lose all the time, because eventually it stops being fun. If you enjoy a game, but every time you play it you get your ass handed to you, eventually you stop.

This isn't true for everybody. There are genres of games dedicated towards extremely challenging mastery where a single win will require hundreds or thousands of losses. Plenty of roguelikes and roguelites like Spelunky and Caves of Qud fall in this category.

and those games quickly stop being fun if you can't secure a win. This is why pure rogue games have given way to roguelikes designed to have meta progression to make it easier to eventually win, or see yourself making progress.

And yes, you stop even those games; eventually you hit a plateau where you see enough and dont advance in skill enough to shelve the game for something much better.

> Let me rephrase: doesn't everyone want to win the game they choose to play? If you don't then maybe you picked the wrong game. If you choose to strive for a fulfilling relationship, and you succeed in achieving that then yes, you've won.

I find the combination of talking about "winning" and "game" in a sense of "having relationships" completely forced and odd. Those two really dont mix well. In the context of personal relationship, association with game and winning is typically related to toxic relationships.

No, not really. I don't do all the things that I do to win, I do it because I actually like them. I like to build things, I don't care if its the best. I like to play basketball, I don't care if I win, we rarely keep score. I know people that always want to win or have the best or be the best at something, it frequently makes them intolerable to be around for others that don't share their passion.

I think I recall a comment from Art Spiegelman about his father who was a Holocaust survivor - something to the effect of, if surviving was winning, did that mean dying was losing?

Another case in point is Bruno Bettelheim - if you read his Wikipedia page, does he come off as a winner or a loser? He seemed very accomplished at one point in time. The article seems to indicate peoples' views of him changed after his death - that he was basically a fraud and an abuser, and did even more harm through the influence of his psychological theories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Bettelheim

Winners send rovers to Mars. Winners create software installed on every other computer on the planet. Winners lead by example.

And for what it's worth, having a fulfilling relationship takes a bit of an effort too.

Losers sit in patent offices dreaming of the theories that gets rovers to mars, or the universal model of computation that allowed computers to exist. People told they must be Bigly Winners become reality-star presidents and certainly set an example.

Thinking a desire to win is necessary to exert effort is intriguing.

There's a difference between ending up winning (I did my thing and others liked what I did) and searching for a win (I need to get ahead / win), which leads to most likely not being true to your nature.

For example Linus wanted to make an operating system, he didn't want to win (I would think), but ended up "winning". But if you want to be like Linus, you'll probably get lost.

edit: grammar, clarification

Yes I completely agree. What I meant by "picking the game you play" is exactly what you say about searching for a win leading to not being true to yourself.