“Once you start competing, that’s when you lose.”
🩶 A Note from Me
Hi, I’m Jessica.
I write NP Fellow Become the CEO Your Health, a weekly mental health and functional medicine newsletter for people who want real, honest, and science-backed support.
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Someone Else’s Success Doesn’t Mean There’s Less for You
Someone gets the opportunity you’ve been hoping for.
Maybe they receive recognition for their work, start a successful business, or accomplish something you’ve been working toward yourself.
You’re happy for them.
You really are, but there’s another feeling underneath it.
What if there’s no room left for me?
What if they’ve already done what I wanted to do?
What if I’m too late?
What if their success means my chances are getting smaller?
It’s an uncomfortable feeling, especially when you genuinely want good things for other people, but sometimes another person’s success brings our own uncertainty to the surface.
We start measuring where we are against where they are and before long, something that happened in someone else’s life begins to feel like a judgment about our own.
→ Someone else’s success starts feeling like evidence that we’ve missed our chance.
I’ve been thinking about how easily we can slip into that way of thinking and how different our choices might look if we stopped assuming that another person’s success leaves less room for us.
The Fear That There’s Only Room for One
I think competitive thinking often begins with an assumption we don’t realize we’re making.
If someone else gets ahead, there’s less opportunity for me.
Sometimes that fear comes from real experiences.
Maybe you’ve competed for a position and didn’t get it.
Maybe you’ve watched someone receive recognition for work similar to yours.
Maybe you’ve spent years pursuing something that still feels out of reach.
Those experiences can make opportunity feel scarce and sometimes it genuinely is, but we can start carrying that sense of scarcity into situations where we haven’t actually established that anything has been taken away from us.
Someone else’s business grows, and we wonder whether there’s room for another.
Someone publishes work on a subject we’re passionate about, and we question whether our perspective is still worth sharing.
Someone reaches a milestone before us, and suddenly we feel behind.
We begin treating their progress as information about our limitations, but another person’s achievement doesn’t necessarily tell us what we’re capable of or what opportunities may still exist.
Their circumstances may be different, their timing may be different, and their path may have very little to do with the one we’re trying to create.
→ Someone else moving forward doesn’t mean you’ve moved backward.
Yet when we’re afraid there’s only room for one, it can feel as though every success that isn’t ours is another chance we’ve lost and that fear can influence what we do next.
Competition Can Make Your World Smaller
Imagine you’ve been thinking about starting a newsletter.
You have ideas you want to explore and experiences you believe could be useful to other people.
Then you discover someone who’s already writing about similar topics.
They have an established audience. Their articles receive attention. They seem to be doing exactly what you were hoping to do.
And your first thought is:
What’s the point? Someone’s already doing it better.
You haven’t written your first article, you haven’t explored how your perspective might be different, and you haven’t given yourself the opportunity to find out whether your work could connect with someone, but you’ve already started questioning whether there’s room for it.
Sometimes we mistake someone else’s head start for evidence that there’s no place for us to begin and this doesn’t only happen with creative projects.
We can do it with careers, businesses, education, relationships, and personal goals.
We see someone further along and start making decisions based on their progress.
We rush because they’re moving faster.
We change direction because their path looks more successful.
We abandon an idea because someone else appears to have reached the destination first.
Comparison can be useful when it helps us learn, but when it becomes the way we measure our possibilities, it can make our world smaller.
We become so focused on what someone else is doing that we stop exploring what we might do differently.
You can become so focused on getting ahead of someone else that you stop asking whether you’re moving toward something you actually want.
And that’s what concerns me most about competitive thinking.
Not that we notice other people’s success, but that we sometimes allow it to decide which possibilities we’re willing to pursue.
What Could You Create Instead?
There’s a difference between trying to outperform someone else’s work and developing something that reflects your own perspective.
When we’re caught in competitive thinking, we may become preoccupied with doing what someone else does, only better.
We look at their results, we study their choices, we measure ourselves against their progress and without realizing it, we can start building our lives around someone else’s definition of success.
Creative thinking offers another way to approach things.
Instead of asking how to get ahead of someone else, we can become curious about what we have to contribute.
Two people can work in the same profession without bringing the same experiences to their work.
Two writers can explore the same subject and offer different perspectives.
Two businesses can serve similar needs while approaching those needs differently.
That doesn’t mean every idea will succeed or that every market has room for everyone, but someone else doing something meaningful doesn’t automatically make your contribution meaningless.
Think about that newsletter.
The other writer may have more experience, a larger audience, or a different approach.
You can learn from what they’ve created, but their work doesn’t answer every question you might explore.
It doesn’t reflect every experience you’ve had and it doesn’t tell you whether your ideas are worth developing.
You don’t have to create something nobody has ever attempted before to contribute something worthwhile.
Sometimes creativity means finding a different way to solve a familiar problem.
Sometimes it means bringing your own experience to a conversation that’s already happening.
Sometimes it means realizing that the goal you’ve been chasing was never really yours in the first place.
When you’re no longer focused entirely on keeping up, you have more room to consider what actually matters to you.
→ That’s the shift I find meaningful.
Creative thinking doesn’t guarantee success. It gives you another way to approach what’s possible.
Limited Opportunities Don’t Mean Limited Possibilities
I don’t think we need to pretend competition doesn’t exist.
Some opportunities really are limited.
There may be one job opening, a limited number of positions, or resources that aren’t equally accessible to everyone and sometimes another person getting an opportunity means we won’t get that particular one.
That’s real, but there’s a difference between recognizing a specific limitation and assuming that every possible path toward your goal is closed.
Not getting one job doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll never find meaningful work.
Someone else succeeding in your field doesn’t mean your abilities have lost their value and discovering that another person has pursued an idea similar to yours doesn’t automatically mean you should abandon it.
Sometimes you’ll need to adjust your expectations and sometimes you’ll need to develop new skills or explore a different approach.
Sometimes you’ll face circumstances that creative thinking alone cannot change, but we can acknowledge those realities without assuming that someone else’s progress has determined our entire future.
One opportunity being limited doesn’t mean every possibility is gone.
I think that’s an important distinction because when we believe every opportunity someone else receives is one less opportunity available to us, we can begin approaching other people’s success with fear.
We may stop seeing what we can learn from them, we may become less willing to collaborate, or we may overlook possibilities because they don’t resemble the path we originally imagined.
However, someone else’s success can also give us information.
It can show us an approach we hadn’t considered.
It can introduce us to a possibility we didn’t know existed.
It can simply remind us that there are different ways to pursue something meaningful.
Their success is information about their experience. It isn’t a verdict on your future.
Final Thoughts
I’ve realized that someone else’s success doesn’t automatically mean there’s less opportunity for me and that realization changes what I want to pay attention to.
I don’t want to spend so much time watching what other people are creating that I forget to explore my own ideas.
I don’t want to mistake someone else’s progress for evidence that I’ve missed my chance.
I don’t want to make decisions about my future based entirely on what someone else has already accomplished.
I can appreciate their success, I can learn from it, and I can still create something of my own.
That doesn’t mean everything I pursue will work out.
It doesn’t mean every opportunity I want will be available, but it does mean I don’t have to assume that someone else’s progress has already determined what’s possible for me.
You can spend your energy worrying about what someone else has, or you can use that energy to explore what you haven’t created yet.
So the next time someone accomplishes something you’ve been hoping for, consider what their success brings up for you.
Does it make you feel as though there’s less room for you?
Does it make you question whether your ideas are worth pursuing?
Or could there be another way to look at it?
You don’t have to stop wanting what you want, you don’t have to pretend competition doesn’t exist, and you don’t have to believe that every opportunity is available to everyone, but you also don’t have to treat someone else’s path as the boundary of your own.
Maybe the question isn’t whether there’s room for you to get ahead of someone else and maybe it’s what you could create if you stopped assuming there wasn’t room for you at all.
Thank you for reading this article.
Until next Sunday,
—Jessica
Your 2am friend who actually gets it
“Remember that rest supports creativity. Don't let your past control your present. Let go of competition so you can be yourself.” —Yung Pueblo
🪩 A Gentle Invitation
If this article resonated with you, you may appreciate my new product called Weekly Skill, a paid NP Fellow series focused on one real, grounded internal skill each week regarding attention, impulse control, emotional regulation, presence, and learning how to work with your nervous system instead of against it.
No pressure. Just an invitation.🤝
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MEDICAL DISCLAIMER
This content is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice or to take the place of such advice or treatment from a personal physician. All readers/viewers of this content are advised to consult their doctors or qualified health professionals regarding specific health questions. All viewers of this content, especially those taking prescription or over-the-counter medications, should consult their physicians before beginning any nutrition, supplement or lifestyle program.
I always reframe it. Someone else succeeding at something is proof I can too. But, there opportunity was good for them, not me. Mine is coming.