How's My Driving?

I try my best not to compare myself to others. I've come to terms with the fact that while my brother was good at playing lacrosse and football, my skills were much more enhanced in areas such as handing people water or recalling the names and primary functions of the three branches of the United States government. It has dawned on me that if all the people on this planet were similar, then life would be boring and each day would be of a cookie-cutter variety with the same people doing the same thing at the same time.

Comparison can be lethal as we begin to focus on others instead of ourselves. I can't help but recall that picture of Olympic champion Michael Phelps cutting through the water with powerful strokes and the guy behind him looking directly at him. The caption reads "Winners focus on winning. Losers focus on winners." Let's all agree that it's a bit harsh to call the guy who took silver at the Olympics a loser. If I took home a silver medal, I would brag about that to everyone I knew, everyday for the rest of my life knowing that there's only one guy in the world who's going to top that story when the family gets together at Christmas and that guy is a whole continent away. Sadly, we seem to credit this guys' swimming prowess as much as we care about Bill Buckner's on base percentage or John Wilkes Booths' actor career.

So in that regard, it is important to focus on bettering yourself and looking straight ahead in your own lane. Another popular quote that I feel obligated to lob in here is "build your own dream or someone will hire you to build theirs. Unless you're Cobb from Inception, in which case you build a dream that causes your wife to lose touch with reality and jump off of a ledge, but cases such as that are few and far between." The point being this, until we master the ability to clone people, there only is or ever will be one of you to do the things that only you have been put in a position to do.

 Now, I am going to dispense with all of this motivational sentimental crap and let my guard down for a moment and open the door for an intimate interaction between you and I as I share an area in my life where I can't help but shift my focus from self-improvement to crippling comparison.

When I'm driving down the road during a rainstorm, I can't help but notice how fast other people have their wipers going in comparison to mine. Sadly, pretty much the second that Mother Nature puts a single teardrop on my windshield, I have this nasty tendency to crank the wipers up to rotations per second akin to that of Usain Bolt's arms in the 100 meter sprint. Meanwhile, everyone around me seems to have more of a lighters during a power ballad kind of speed going on and I think to myself "I need to calm down." Unfortunately, while others see a minor inconvenience. I see the end of the world as we know it.

In closing, we all have our shortcomings. Maybe you don't exercise as much as you should. Maybe you are a Chicago Blackhawks fan.  Maybe a pinch of precipitation causes you to send your windshield wipers into cycle rivaled only by that of the luggage in an overhead compartment on a turbulent flight. Again, I just ask that people remember "Winners focus on winning. Losers focus on memorizing the content of the 1935 fifteen hour filibuster by the appropriately named, Huey Long, on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Thank you very much.