62. How to Win When They Have a Head Start

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - "How to Win When They Have a Head Start."

Have you ever felt like other people got a head start in life, like they were born taller, richer, smarter, more connected? Well, maybe they were, but even with all of those advantages, they're still not guaranteed to win, and neither are you unless you stop playing their game. So, you can play your own game.

So, someone was telling me a story recently about this guy that was born with a disease that made his spine form abnormally, and the effect was he didn't grow very tall, and he's dealt with major joint issues throughout his life. This friend of mine that was telling me the story mentioned how hard it really was on this guy and that he'd sometimes just get stuck dwelling on his misfortunes, and I completely understand that's a serious disadvantage in life.

I don't really have that many disadvantages in life, but regardless, I still find myself sulking about the things that I feel deficient in. There may be somebody out there in the world that has no deficiency. That person might be a good-looking guy that's six four, smart, athletic, muscly, and from a good family, but I bet even he would have his moments of feeling less than others.

And maybe some other guy has all those things but is even more intelligent. You might be the prettiest woman in town, but the man of your dreams wanted someone else. There are limitless ways to feel inadequate. If there is a way to feel inadequate, we will find our way there. We seem to like to place ourselves into competition with the rest of the world by comparing ourselves to them.

But I wonder what it is that we're competing for. We compare ourselves against others for things that can't even change. So sometimes it seems like we're competing in the wrong race and for the wrong prize. The races I see us putting ourselves in are things like, who's got the greatest value in this sexual marketplace?

Or who is strongest? Who is the richest? But also, sometimes we compete to see who's been dealt the worst cards. As a kid, I literally felt deficient at times for not being as poor as some of the other kids at school who bragged about it. So presumably we like to compare and compete against others because there's some kind of prize for winning.

Otherwise, I'm not sure why we do it, but I think that the prize for most of us is simply to feel better than someone else, just as we will find any way possible to feel inadequate. We also have a million different ways to feel better than someone else. We will feel better than someone else for being poorer than them, just as fast as feeling better than them for being richer.

It just makes me think sometimes what is this nonsense game that we're playing? If we can literally use anything to make ourselves feel superior or inferior to anyone else, then maybe this game of comparison is nothing more than a giant hamster wheel. I wonder sometimes why we're competing at all when the only thing most of us really want is to feel content.

Or maybe I'm wrong and contentment is not what we're looking for, but even if I am wrong, contentment still is the only prize worth attaining. I. But how do you compete for contentment? I think the nice thing about contentment is that you don't compete for it. That being said, our nature seems to be to strive and there are benefits to being good at a thing.

So, it begs the question, how do we get ahead when we are so far behind? It seems that the trick to catching up in a race where we have a disadvantage. It is to play a different game where we don't, for example, if I have dwarfism and I'm trying to become a world class sprinter, my disadvantage is going to be too great to overcome.

But the good thing about life is there are a lot of different games for us to play, and we don't all have to play the same one. Although if you're going to try and play a different game in life, you need to know what you're hoping the game can give you. See, two people may be competing in the same game, but with very different purposes.

And two people can be playing different games, but with the same purpose. You might be striving to make as much money as possible for the purpose of trying to be more attractive to women, or you might be bodybuilding for the same purpose. While one person may be playing sports, for the joy of working outside is something that they like.

Another person may be doing it for status. One person may be chasing money to feel like they have value while the other may be chasing money because it helps with different pursuits. Most of the wants we pursue seem to fall into just a handful of deeper wants and the case of sports. Maybe the deeper want for one of those people is to feel like they're worthy while for the other.

The deeper want is nothing more than a desire for the pleasure that the game brings them. Let's just imagine that you're severely disadvantaged in spite of our disadvantages. There's almost always some game where those disadvantages do not apply. A person without legs can still arm wrestle, and a person without arms can still run.

You might be behind in most races, but there will always be one of them that you have some capacity to win at. Your options inherently are going to be fewer than the options that some people have, and that goes for just about everybody in the world. But even if a person has no disadvantages whatsoever and could excel in anything they pursue, they still have the limitation of their time and attention.

No person can excel at everything because no person has unlimited time and attention. One of the greatest advantages people have in any game is how much time that they're willing to dedicate to it. The world will never know who the greatest athlete of all time is because the greatest athlete of all time cannot excel at the highest levels in every sport because they don't have the time or may even have some disadvantage in a particular sport.

The good news for anyone that has ever felt disadvantaged is that opportunities to succeed at a thing are basically limitless. And even if you are excluded from 90% of those opportunities, 10% of limitless is still a very big number. I believe that most unhappiness in our world comes from the comparison of ourselves to others.

It comes from playing games We cannot win, or games that we could win that we just don't choose to engage with. Ultimately, the unhappiness we experience in life comes down to us. I heard in another podcast recently that people that win the lottery feel incredibly happy when they win, but roughly a year later, they feel about the same level of happiness as they did before they won it.

And likewise, people that become quadriplegics feel incredibly depressed for a time, but roughly a year later, they feel about as happy as they did before their accident. See how content and happy we are. It's not really tied to the things that are going on in our life, but rather something deeper inside of us.

The real lesson is that the game we need to be playing is really an internal one. It is independent of everyone else in the world, hard as we may try. To best everyone. The only person worth besting is our lesser self. 

This is Skipping Stones. You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts.

For more information about me, feel free. Free to visit skippingstonessr.com. And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me at info@skippingstonessr.com. New episodes will be released weekly every Monday.