Mastering oneself
It Was Never You Versus Them. It Was Always You Versus You.
You’re not in competition with the people around you. Everyone is running a different race, carrying different burdens, chasing different goals, walking a path you’ll never fully understand. The only comparison that matters is the one between who you are today and who you were yesterday.
A few years ago I took up padel, which is what a hairdresser does when he wants to be humbled by geometry. Last Tuesday I lost a match to a man half my age, and spent most of it furious at him. Between games, my partner set me straight: “Count the points. He’s hit maybe four winners all night. Everything else, we handed over. You’re not losing to him. You’re losing to yourself.”
I counted. He was right. And on the drive home I realised he had described considerably more than padel.
[Switches to serious face.] What follows is what I wish someone had told me thirty years ago — about the match each of us is actually playing.
The Only Comparison That Matters
Life becomes much simpler when you stop measuring yourself against everyone else. The truth is, you’re not in competition with the people around you. Everyone is running a different race, carrying different burdens, chasing different goals, and walking a path you’ll never fully understand.
The only comparison that matters is the one between who you are today and who you were yesterday.
Have you grown? Have you learned from your mistakes? Have you become wiser, stronger, kinder, or more disciplined?
If the answer is yes, then you’re already succeeding.
The only place where your life can actually change is this present moment. Photo: Unsplash
The Movie in Your Head
One of the greatest obstacles to that growth isn’t other people. It’s your own mind. We spend far too much time worrying about a future that hasn’t happened and replaying a past that cannot be changed. We suffer more from our imagination than we do from reality. Fear steals today’s peace by making us live in tomorrow’s problems, while regret keeps us chained to yesterday’s pain.
Neither serves us.
The past has already taught its lessons. The future will arrive when it arrives. The only place where your life can actually change is this present moment. Letting go of fear and regret doesn’t mean pretending painful experiences never happened. It means refusing to let them continue controlling the person you’re becoming.
Photo: Unsplash
Kindness Needs Boundaries
Growth also requires learning the difference between kindness and self-sacrifice.
Having a good heart is a strength, but without boundaries it quickly becomes an invitation for others to take advantage of you. Some people mistake compassion for weakness. They assume your patience has no limits, your forgiveness has no end, and your generosity comes without a cost.
That’s when respect begins to disappear.
Being kind doesn’t mean allowing yourself to be disrespected. Real kindness includes respecting yourself enough to say no, to walk away when necessary, and to protect your peace. The saying “treat others the way you want to be treated” only works when respect flows in both directions. Without reciprocity, kindness becomes exploitation.
An important truth to remember is that people give you what they have, not what you deserve.
Someone who hasn’t learned to love cannot genuinely offer love. Someone who doesn’t respect themselves often struggles to respect others. A person who lives in constant chaos cannot bring peace into your life.
Their behavior is a reflection of their character, not your worth.
What you deserve isn’t determined by how someone else treats you. It’s determined by the standards you set for yourself and the behaviors you’re willing, or unwilling, to accept.
“People give you what they have, not what you deserve.” — Their behavior is a reflection of their character, not your worth.
Attitudes Are Contagious
Those standards become even more important when you consider the people you surround yourself with. Attitudes are contagious. So is negativity.
Researchers have shown that introducing just one consistently negative person into a group dramatically increases conflict while reducing cooperation, creativity, and performance. And those effects appeared after less than an hour together.
Now imagine what years of exposure can do.
Protecting your mental health isn’t selfish. It’s necessary. Not everyone deserves unlimited access to your time, your energy, or your attention. Sometimes the healthiest decision you can make is to let certain people go.
One bad apple, the researchers found, is not a figure of speech. Photo: Unsplash
Red Cars
The same principle applies to opportunity.
Many people believe luck is something that randomly happens to a fortunate few. In reality, opportunity often goes unnoticed because we aren’t paying attention. If someone promised to pay you for every red car you spotted today, you would suddenly notice red cars everywhere. They didn’t magically appear. Your focus simply changed.
Life works the same way.
Opportunities surround us every day, but we only recognize what we’ve trained ourselves to see. The mind finds what it looks for. Focus on obstacles, and you’ll find reasons to quit. Focus on possibilities, and you’ll begin to notice doors that were always there.
The red cars didn’t magically appear — your focus changed. Photo: Unsplash
The Receipts
None of this is only folk wisdom. “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality” goes back to Seneca, two thousand years before anyone could measure a stress hormone. The one-bad-apple finding comes from modern research on team dynamics, and institutions like Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center have documented the mirror image for two decades: calm, gratitude, and goodwill spread through groups just as infectiously as negativity does.
You Versus You
At the end of the day, the quality of your life is shaped less by what happens to you and more by where you place your attention, who you allow into your life, the boundaries you choose to protect, and the person you decide to become.
Don’t waste your energy trying to outperform everyone else. Invest it in becoming a little wiser than yesterday, a little stronger than yesterday, and a little more at peace than yesterday.
Because in the only competition that truly matters, it’s never you versus them.
It’s always you versus you.
Back to the Court
We played the rematch this week. I lost again — padel is not a fairy tale — but the score tightened, because this time I played my own game instead of his. On one of the last points, my partner called out “Better!” after a rally we lost. He was keeping the only score that updates.
I touched a related thread in a previous piece on the lemon that never existed — proof, in sixty seconds, that we suffer more from imagination than from reality. Tuesday’s match was the same lesson with a racket in my hand: the opponent was mostly a spectator, the disasters were mostly rehearsals, and the doors were mostly open.
As for the salon — years in, the count stands at one chair, one mirror, and one opponent, who shows up every morning . Some mornings I win. The rematch is daily.
The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.
