How to Stay Competitive: A Self Reminder
If we drive our car every day, could we become a better driver? Not necessary. Daily driver of course will be good in driving compared to the new learner. He can act and respond promptly for some sudden event on the road. However, it will not make he can do more than mundane driver task as he do daily. There will be no way such ordinary driver could race in circuit just out of sudden. Racer is also a driver but not vice versa. Racer need enormous training to gain his expertise.
Today I am thinking about how we always have to improve our competitive advantage in this life so that we could be more than just "ordinary driver". After all, basically life is about competition, isn't it? Competition itself that bring our world as now. The good example of competition bring is advancement technology around us. There will be no major invention, airplane, transistor, computer or sophisticated gadget without driven by competition. At other side political competition by using unfair way is the negative example.
In this note, I would like to elaborate my own view of how to be stay on the edge. The first step is to go outside our mundane life. I realized that sometime human trapped in a comfort zone when everything is just feel fit perfectly and the routine is just nice. However the comfort zone bring the stagnancy that will make we less competitive. When we arrived in such situation we should push the throttle hard so that wouldn't stuck too long.
The example of pushing the throttle act are as follow. Read a good book. With all of sophisticated invention in modern life, still book is one of most effective way to transfer information and knowledge that can stand against time and place. Book will bring a new information that we can learn and also good story that can inspire. Sometime I read a few books in one month but another time I even don't read any book in several months. As a rule of thumb, at least read one book every month should give us a great advantage in long run and will keep us ahead most of people.
Second important way of how to keep competitive is by make friend and meet awesome people. There will no more factual inspiration rather than actual story from the person itself. People can give inspiration and share useful experience. Which at the end could make us feel "envy" and motivate us to do better in life. Making friend with such good people also will bring so much benefit. Old idiom said bird of same feathers flock together. Making friend with awesome people definitely will help us to learn and adapt to be such awesome as them.
The next important step that we need to do is patiently doing something to make us always on top. One day we might find an insight to improve our life by doing this or that. However, most of time motivation is fluctuate and easy to go up and down. One of the factor when sometime motivation is going down when we chase something is impatient. It is a nature that human often want instant result.
As an example, we cannot be rich just in short time except winning a lottery which is usually will not give long lasting result. Chasing a wealth need a hard effort and sometime a long process. We need to earn coin by coin, sometime push our self from wasting money unnecessary by not buying something that we don't need although we might want it so hard.
Another example is the effort of mastering something. There is no shortcut. There is maybe a crash course that will give us general knowledge about something that we would like to learn. But still mastering skill and knowledge will need long time and much patient. Malcolm Gladwell discussing this in his famous 10.000 hours rule. He said that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. Patient hold major role here. Without patient we can easily lost motivation. Patient is a virtue and impatient is a vice.
At the end this note is a reminder for myself so that I will be alarmed to do continuously improvement in daily life.