#31 Run Your Own Race

Hey, this is Dave Burgess, and you are listening to The Dave Burgess Show, where we talk education, lifestyle, entrepreneurship, fitness, wellness, principles of success, interview elite performers in their field, and most importantly, cover topics that will empower, inspire, and uplift you. Let's go.

Welcome to Episode 31 of The Dave Burgess Show.

Teddy Roosevelt once said, comparison is the thief of joy. I've always loved that quote, and I believe it's 100% true.

Let me tell you a few stories. One time I was running on the big island of Hawaii along Ali'i Drive. One of my favorite runs is to run along Ali'i Drive. I was approaching this guy, and I had to move out onto the road a little ways to pass him because I was just ready to smoke this guy. I was thinking to myself, okay, I'm not the smoothest runner. I'm not the fastest runner, but I'm about to speed past this dude at least, and I felt good about myself as I moved out around him and moved past him and pulled away and completed my run and got back to my car, drove home, got into the shower, showered, put my clothes on, had breakfast, sat around for a little bit, and then got in my car to go get my Fountain Diet Coke, which I love. And as I'm driving to the store to get the Fountain Diet Coke, I'm on this big hill on the big island, and who do I pass? I pass this guy still running. I'm like, you got to be kidding me. This was over an hour after I had passed him earlier. This guy was still running, and now he's making up this enormous hill, a hill that I wouldn't even dream to run, right? And it hit me like, wait a second. I'm out there running my 5K, four mile, five mile, something like that. This guy's probably, that was probably mile seven of a 20-mile run or something, and I'm comparing myself to him as I'm flying by him, right?

And another time, same place, Ali'i Drive. As I'm getting ready to, there's a beach park that I love to start my run at there, and I see this woman over on the side of the road, and she's stretching, and she starts off running about the same time that I'm starting to run, and she's kind of, I know, she's just started her run. I know she's already kind of struggling, and I wasn't looking at her in a judgmental way of like, I'm better than her. I was looking at her almost with some sympathy, like, oh, well, good for her to be out here, and like, she's probably pretty new to this, and she's just like struggling. Like, look, she's just in her first quarter mile, and I feel like she's already struggling a little bit, and I finish my run. I come back to the parking lot area of the beach park, and I'm taking some pictures out there of the palm trees, get a couple selfies and all that to post on Instagram, and in comes this woman finishing her run, and I'm like, oh, wow, okay, like, good for her. It's like she did a pretty long run. And then I see her walk over to this big pickup truck where there's all kinds of people loading up bicycles and swimming equipment, and she's over there. She grabs a bicycle, throws it into the back of the truck, grabs like her swim bag or towel, throws it into the back of the truck, and I realize, oh, wait a second. This is like a triathlon training group. I was like seven in the morning. I'm starting my run. Well, yeah, she was starting her run at seven in the morning, too, but she had already been there, swam, and did a whole bike ride before the run, and I'm sitting here going, oh, wow, look at her struggling in her first quarter mile. Yeah, she had already done two events before my little 5K run, right?

And it's just so easy to be judgmental. I'll tell you an example in the other direction. So I was running in San Diego, and all of a sudden, this guy speeds past me, just running so smooth, so fast. It was along the boardwalk in Mission Beach, and I'm like, oh my gosh, this guy, I'm never going to be able to run this good. Look at this guy. He's like completely smoking me. Look how smooth he is.

He looks effortless. And I kept running a little further down the way, and all of a sudden, I see him over on the side, and he's kind of doubled over, and he's trying to grasp his breath, and he's resting, and I keep running. Well, a few minutes later, this guy comes and speeds by me again. I run across him again. He's sitting over on the side. He's resting, deep breathing. I'm like, wait a second. This guy's not even in the same event as me. He's not even doing the same race, kind of race as me. I'm sitting out here in my zone two, easy running, able to have a conversation while you're running, kind of breathing style, right? And this guy's doing high-intensity interval training. He's running sprints and then resting in between his sprints, and I'm feeling bad as he's passing me and talking about how I'll never be that good. He's not even in the same race as me, right? He's not even trying to do the same thing as me. But we do this all the time in both directions, okay? We have to learn that we don't know what that other person's story is. We don't know what's going on in their life. We don't know what obstacles that they are trying to overcome. You don't know what privileges they have that you didn't or that you've had and they didn't. Everybody is in a different place, right?

One of my favorite trends on TikTok right now or viral videos is this guy. It's anatoly__pranks, and he dresses like he's kind of like a custodian of the gym. He's got on like a jumpsuit, like a custodial jumpsuit, and he's cleaning. He's got cleaning products with him, and he comes up to these guys that are just huge, like giant muscle heads, right? And when they finish their set, he's like, hey, do you mind if I clean right here? And he kind of cleans around the weights. Sometimes he'll do something like somebody that's just been deadlifting with some enormous amount of weight, he'll pick it up and move it like it's a feather to move it out of the way and then dusts underneath it. And you see these big giant guys going like, what the heck is going on here, right? Or he'll come up to a group of people and they're doing like a two-handed row with just plates stacked on each side. And he says, oh, is this for back? And he picks it up with one arm and starts doing it, and you just see their faces.

There's another one where a guy is bench pressing, one of those things where there's plates on each side piled on, and he's doing like a one or two rep, kind of a PR, kind of a lift. And Anatoly, who actually, by the way, is the world-class Ukrainian powerlifter, Vladimir Shmynko, I think it's called Shmynko, Shmynko, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, but he's a Ukrainian powerlifter, okay? And so he just kind of has disguised his musculature in this outfit that he's wearing, and he asks if he can do a set. And the guys look at him like, are you crazy? Like, you can't do this set. Like, he looks tiny compared to the guy who was lifting the weights. And then he's, oh, no, no, no, don't take the plates off. Like, this will be fine. And he sits down on the bench and he just starts ripping off rep after rep. And then he starts bicycling his legs and saying, like, I'd like to get a leg workout at the same time. And you see this guy watching, who could barely do it one or two times, but was like about twice the guy's size, just stunned. His jaw like drops to the floor.

The reason why those videos are so fun to see is just because people are so judgmental. People judge people by what they look like. And they don't know the story. They don't know the story behind this guy. They don't know that this guy is world class. But by just looking at him and by seeing him in the custodial outfit, they make a snap judgment and think that he has no business lifting the kind of weights that they're lifting. And it's so common for this to happen. And it's something that we really have to watch out for.

And sometimes we have to understand that when people are doing it to us, it's not saying anything about us. It's saying something about them. John Acuff once said, don't compare your beginning to someone else's middle or your middle to someone else's end. I see this a lot with education and with speaking, with books, all that kind of stuff where someone's like, well, look at your social media following. I'm never going to get to that spot. I'm like, well, hold on. Wait a second. I remember when I got my first follower. I remember when I ticked over to 100 followers. I remember when my first thousand followers, I got my thousandth follower. And now looking at it, looking back, it's easy to forget that I started the same. I had a beginning too. Same with speaking. Someone will say, well, you seem so polished and you seem like you don't even use notes or anything like this with your keynote. You don't even have really slides that you use. How do you remember all that stuff? I'm like, well, you understand that I've been doing Teach Like a Pirate presentations for about 16 years, like 16 years. So you are just starting to do keynotes and you are expecting yourself, have an expectation that you're going to have a level of polish that I have 16 years into the game. It's not realistic. It's you're setting yourself up for failure. Everybody has a beginning. Everyone else has a middle. Everyone else, everyone has an end point. And where you are on your journey is not a direct match for someone else.

And it works the other way too, where sometimes we judge someone and we're like, well, wait a second. That person is just beginning there. We shouldn't be judging that person. They're just beginning right now. And so we can't expect them to be at a level of mastery that we would expect for someone who's been in the game for a while. Epictetus said it this way, we are not privy to the stories behind people's actions. So we should be patient with others and suspend judgment of them, recognizing the limits of our understanding.

And as I tell you this, I for sure want to say that I am guilty of this too. It's hard not to do it, right? But I can remember all sorts of ups and downs along my journey in speaking. And no matter what it is that you're thinking, I can remember when my book came out, it did almost nothing for the first six months. For six months, my book did almost nothing. And then it started to catch on. It started to be spread. It started to kind of go viral on social media. And then it took off, sold more each year for like three or four years. But if you would have judged it by its first six months, then it would have looked like it was going to be a very disappointing thing.

I can remember speaking at EdCamp San Diego, and I was already a fairly well-known speaker at that point. But I can remember being up there and cutting myself open during a magic trick in front of all of EdCamp San Diego, bleeding out for the rest of my time up there, someone handing me a paper towel to wrap around myself to sop up the blood as I was presenting and finishing off what I was trying to do. I can remember these crazy stories. I can remember getting lost in the middle of presentations. I can remember a keynote where I gave a turn and talk question to the audience. Well, anyone who's ever seen me speak knows I don't give turn or talk questions to the audience during keynotes. I have so much to say. I'm talking about a thousand words per minute to try to jam it all in, right? And the reason I gave the turn and talk is because I got confused at where I was. And I had to like pull myself together and try to regroup and try to figure out where I was starting my presentation again. Now, if anyone saw that from the outside, they would just say like, oh, he just gave this like little question for people to reflect on during his keynote. But if you would have seen inside my brain, I was in full panic mode on stage, right?

And so you never know what someone else is going through. You never know. Like you don't know the story behind a lot of things that you see. That math board magic trick that I do in many of my presentations with all the numbers in the different directions swirling together and adding up to the audience's chosen number in different ways. I've gotten it wrong before. I've stood in front of an audience with that board and started to add them up in like my full energetic presentational mode and realized I got one of the numbers wrong and they were all wrong on the board and had to adjust on the fly and try to figure out a way to get out of it. And by the way, there really is no way out of it. You're just, it's just pretty much over. Once you make a mistake on that board, it's in Sharpie, it's gone, it's over. And so I've had that happen to me before.

So if you are new at something, if you're struggling, if you're having some challenges and you are looking at other people who are performing better in that area, just understand that maybe you're just in a different space, maybe you're just in a different place along the journey. And by the way, if you're a little further along the journey of other people, turn around, reach back and help those people get a little further along their way. You've just been there. You've just been over those obstacles. You've just faced those challenges and you may be able to have some encouragement, some inspiration, some tips, some advice that will help them get past those same roadblocks and get further along their path towards success.

So whether you are just beginning, don't be intimidated by people that are ahead of you or whether you're further along the path, don't be judgmental of those behind you. Turn around, lend a hand, help them get up to where you are as you continue your way further to the top as well. And so comparison is the thief of joy. Make sure that you're not only comparing what you're doing in your race to other people who are in different places, but also they might not even be in your race. They might not even be in your event. Just run your own race.

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Transcribed by https://otter.ai