“There Will Always Be Someone Better Than You”

“There Will Always Be Someone Better Than You”

Born out of good intention to teach children to reject the necessity for perfection, this phrase has overstayed its welcome in my vernacular. 

We have already accepted that we will never be the best, so we let the butterflies flit around in our stomachs and we flinch from our shadows because we have been told over and over that “There will always be someone better than you.” So why bother? We have mistaken difficulty for impossibility and we are living our lives braced for failure. In fact, we have practically trained ourselves to wait for the inevitable fall from the pedestal, and with that we are too scared to try for success. How can we be authors and singers and dancers and politicians when there will always be someone better than us? It has become far too easy to delegitimize ourselves by idealizing our peers, but the fact of the matter is that someone has to be on Broadway, someone has to write novels, someone has to make laws, and someone has to change the world, so why not us?

So this phrase that has been embedded into our psyche, “There will always be someone better than you,” is overdue for a rewrite. There is no need to replace the expression with a perfectionist complex, but perhaps it is time to let ourselves believe that we too have the potential that we project onto our peers. It is time to teach ourselves that mistakes are not indicative of failure and competition is no reason to stop competing. Personally, I think it’s time to start telling myself: “There will always be a way to be better than you were yesterday.”