It’s not a competition

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There are eight billion people in the world. if you think you are in a competition with them, you will lose. If you don't believe that, learn some statistics.

Only people who are in a competition try to be like someone else. So don’t be in. Competition . Life is not a fucking competition.The key is to be unique. Go off piste. Find a furrow no-one cares about but you, and plough the hell out of it. Forget your rank. Find your niche.

Ask yourself: is anyone exactly like you? You know, exactly? There isn’t, right? You know that, deeply, in your bones: even if there were 20 billion people on this planet, no-one is exactly like you. Not even identical twins are exactly alike. So why would you try to compete to be someone else? Why shorten your own, actually good, odds of uniqueness?

Learn to love yourself for who you are, for God’s sake. No matter how good you can be at something standard, someone else will be better, and the odds are they will make a machine that is even better than that.

But no-one will ever try to make a machine that is better than you at being you. So fill your space. Be proud of it.

Who was Bowie trying to be a better than? Were the Wachowskis trying to improve on Hitchcock? Was JK Rowling trying to be a better Lewis Carroll? Who was Douglas Adams trying to beat? Joan Armatrading? Stanley Kubrick? David Foster Wallace? Ursula K Guinn? William Blake? Friedrich Nietzsche?

Life is not a Q magazine listicle. Resist the modernist urge to channel yourself into a standard fucking format.

Grow a pair. And own the fucking things.

This rant was brought to you by Glenfiddich. God bless.

See also

• Off piste