You just need to be one step ahead!

“Hey, the results just came out.” Told me one of my friends, while we sat on the chairs outside a classroom on a hot Pune afternoon. I had been waiting for the results of my examination for quite some time, knowing I had done my best, and I was not disappointed. Turned out I had edged the person at the top of the previous semester by just one mark.

It was pretty good. It was not the first time however something like that was happening to me. For most of my life, I have been the winner only by slight margins, and most of those times, it’s been deliberate.

I like to only put in enough effort to win by a slight margin, if at the end, I end up winning by a large margin then that’s even better. But this post deals with why you only need to win by small margins to truly stand out, I.E: Be just slightly better or slightly ahead of your nearest competition.

The tendency to accept “Good Enough” or “Slightly Better”

Has this ever happened to you? You are in a grocery store shopping for, say, apples, not all of them are good, but the nearest grocery store might be a kilometer away, you aren’t going to that grocery store in search of just a few better apples, so you end up choosing the ones that are just better than the others.

Humans have this tendency to settle for the best they can find, sometimes things just “good enough”, but in a confined space. The moment they feel something is out of reach, they will settle for the next best thing.

It is why people (most of them) don’t go chasing after celebrities.

Competition in Class

Chances are if you’re reading this, you have been to a school or college class with a sizeable number of students, the upper echelons of those classes usually came out on top, marginally edging each other in terms of marks.

Now, the thing with a class of fourty people is that the comparisons usually happen all inside the class itself, it is unusual for people to be compared with counterparts from different schools or different colleges.

If ninety per cent of the class gets below-average marks, the person that gets average marks is suddenly the better one out of them all, even though the lowest graded student of another class might have gotten better marks than the best of this class.

Competition at Work

Competition in class is all fine until you get to the place that actually matters. A place where your appraisal, your bonuses and every other perk literally depends on your performance being better than other people.

At work, it’s the same scenario, you just have to be slightly better at something than everybody in order to cement your place as the office’s go-to person for that “something”.

It happens very often that a company isn’t making much progress, and decides to layoff a part of its workforce. Now the part of the workforce that is removed is not the part that doesn’t work well, most of the company doesn’t, instead, it’s the part that works just worse than everyone else to not be seen as contributing enough to the company’s progress.

The people that get a promotion are the ones that just work better than the other team members. For example, if the team members are producing one module on average, the person who produces even two is seen as superior and worthy of recognition. Even though someone from another team might be producing as many as seven, but they are overlooked.

The above is the reason, why just good enough people in teams are also difficult to get rid of in teams that are not very productive.

Don’t forget to know what others are capable of though.

All the above said, don’t forget to actually assess the standards of everyone else around you. It may be impractical to try edging out everyone else in a group of people at something they are all way better than you at.

For example, making it to the college’s basketball team is not easy in case you have never played basketball is not practical. You have to compete at something you can gain an advantage at. Not knowing where other people stand ahead of you is going to be at a disadvantage to you.

Leaving Statements

To guide other people, and to be recognized, you just have to know a little more than the other person.

There is a reason that there exists a saying “If you’re the best in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” It’s because life is basically about making progress and in the end, not trying to compete with others. It’s great to compete with others and being the best there is, but at the end of the day, the goal is to compete with yourself. If you’re improving yourself every day, you will eventually be better than anyone else there is.

Constantly improving is going to land you in rooms you never knew existed, and will force you to improve even more, until the feedback loop ends at you turning out to be the best possible version of yourself.