Setting Ourselves Apart in a Noisy World
Time to step away from competition and high-speed races
Let’s talk about competition. Today you’re outmatched in every sense by someone or the other. Name any skill/talent and there’ll be a quarter of the planet to outclass you. Heck, you’ll find a prodigy in your own street, who already beats you to everything at two decades younger. The internet and globalization have exposed and shamed too many of us.
To those who want nothing more than to matter to the world, in their own unique, irreplaceable way — this is severely dispiriting; A trigger towards a nihilistic outlook on all ambition and competence.
Let’s veer away from that and rethink competence. How do we set ourselves apart — where do we start? Knowing the best skills on our resume could be quickly overshadowed by pros who’re already 200 miles ahead of us on the “race”.
Rather it might be time to pivot to a different kind of competence that goes overlooked. We’re tired of running and keeping up, in a race we’re outmatched in every respect by better runners. Is running the only way to move beyond the boundary? Or is there a more direct (but not easy) route to carving our spot in history, where we play and win a different game involving zero competitors — one we’re fit for, one that didn’t require us to run until our ligament tore and gave away, but only asked of us endurance and commitment.
What are these competencies?
Let’s start with number one:
The Game of the Eye.
The Eye: What Do You Value?
To those who’ll never be the “best” at things, It’s time to develop the eye, as a competence and core value.
Not to be mistaken for physical eye-sight — everyone can see my dear, and we certainly won’t be the “best” at that — the gift of a penetrating eye-sight is about perception, of valuing things that go unnoticed by the populace (which includes the race running elites).
We can set ourselves apart by what we choose to value.
The eye assigns charge and weight to entities around, sniffs opportunities, hunts down white spaces, and digs out gold from unlikely spots. Because what we see and how we see can immediately set us apart from any competition.
“We become what we aim at.” — Jordan Peterson
The eye mingles and mixes different colors in varying degrees rather than trying “to the best at one color”.
The eye connects dots and revalues things (Think Steve Jobs’s efforts to drive perfection in art and design into electronic products- an unlikely combination at the time)
It is a skill, but one who’s development to finish will leave you with lesser, not more competition.
Top executives at powerful firms are chosen and valued for their decisions — not the “fastest or highest scorer”. There is an irreplaceable value stored for those who have an eye for value. Eye.
Look around you right now — your desk, books, laptop, colleagues/family. Everything you touch has been assigned a default value by your eye; All the mundane things have been valued at a meager $1 say, while a few aspects important to you — a risky job, a looming crisis — have been assigned more weight, say $500. At all times you’re valuing and devaluing something. As you focus on one, the others get demoted to pennies. We can’t stake a high value at everything — we’d go nuts! We prioritize, sometimes involuntarily.
Knowing this, here’s what I am coming at:
Some of the most brilliant people on earth, with an irreplaceable spot in history, set themselves apart (not by necessarily being the “best” but) by valuing that which almost everyone around them wasn’t looking at. Just that — by valuing opportunities, problems, people that got overlooked by most.
Your competitors are not all those who are “doing” what you are doing, or those who are being paid for what you’re being paid for — Rather your competitors are only those who’re looking at the same things you are. And that makes all the difference.
The majority are looking pretty much at similar things in closely parallel value systems. But, what do you value? You.
For instance, if there’s something rotten and distasteful going on around you, do you notice it? Many don’t — many are too “busy” valuing something else.
If you have the eye to notice, do you act on it and fix it? Some problematic shit tends to continue in our environments for years and decades without getting noticed or valued(Think the 2009 financial crisis). We’re in the age of irresponsibility and indifference. We’re looking at everything and nothing. Maybe then, the way to set ourselves apart here, today, is to look sharply at things worth seizing responsibility for, especially for the things around you — those that no one bothers about.
What do you renew and revitalize
Another stupidity of our modern pop ideas: The celebration of Novelty
Novelty in its daily preachings attributes the majority of our evolution and progress to “new” ideas and endeavors — extraordinary, out of the earth, original, previously unthought of. Most as a result are trying to be “different” in desperate, yet shallow ways (think the funky haircuts displayed by teens).
We forget that a music composer works with the same twelve notes throughout his career, without feeling the need to create a “new and fantastic” thirteenth note to dazzle us.
Twelve notes offer enough. His job is to renew their significance through his varied works. The artist renews and revitalizes what already exists.
The Renaissance came into being out of a revitalization of Classical Greek thought. And Greece probably grew out of a recreation of something before them.
Why did the Renaissance stand out? Because no one else bothered looking into ancient Greece. No one else was looking.
Even now if you watch carefully, there are things being overlooked and neglected. Here’s the way to stand out — Look at them with eyes wide open and perform a revitalization.
You won’t become popular by this, Wall street journal won’t do a profile on you, but this will grant you an invaluable asset in standing out wherever you go, in the little islands you visit. Isn’t that a better way to place your mark on the world?
The probability that what we need most (as a solution, a push) lies among the things we neglect is high, implying that gold lies in front of us, around us but hidden and dusty thanks to an untrained eye.
How many times have we struggled to change something at our homes/workplaces, trying to pull every lever, break walls, jump cliffs only to find the answer in front of us, in one simple move — a press of a button on a remote we always had in our coats — which mysteriously eluded us all this while. By the end, we cry out: “How come I didn’t see that!”
Ever tried fixing a motorcycle, or appliance? We fidget through the whole device, till the point we dismantle it completely, only to find the thing needed fixing was merely _____ (fill in your own blanks)
How do solutions and breakthroughs evade us?
Answer: They don’t pop up in our eye-radar. The things we don’t value miss our scanners and slips over us like water on rock.
What fixed and built momentum lay in a revaluation rather than invention. Our contribution and breakthrough may lie in how we improve/transform the way we look at things already around us, rather than scanning for new gold. We already have gold, we just can’t see it — because looking and valuing is an art.
This provides us with an impetus to look more deeply and sharply at our own community/town, rather than the world at large splashed across all media.
Step Up and Look Around
George Washington, being in his early 20’s, with no military rank was chosen for a crucial negotiation with the rival French forces during the French-Indian War in the American continent. A huge step that threw him into the big arena, and lay seeds for his later fame.
So, why was he chosen? A young, ambitious man with no military experience at the time.
Skill? Nope, he was a green 21-year-old. What do you expect?
Connections and network? Not so much
Looks and charms? Nope
Answer: He was chosen because he stepped up and volunteered, where few did.
Read that again my friend.
Washington briskly stepped up for something that few others had. He had no competitors! Why?
Because no one stepped up; No one was looking.
Surely there were more capable and experienced men at the time who would’ve been more fit for the job, but history missed them somehow and instead latched on to the one who lay waiting for it, watching it, neglecting nothing — George Washington.
He wasn’t the “best” or the “topmost” or the “fastest” or the “prettiest”.
He had something better than all that:
A sharp eye and a willingness to follow it.
