Manifest Your Own Lane
As an athlete growing up, I constantly tried competing against a fellow athlete or a benchmark that this person has set. Not just in sports but I found this competitive nature taking over me. I always found myself competing with someone slightly better than me and tried finding ways to get better. I thought of it as a pretty good way to tackle any competitive situation but as I grew up, I found this mentality of chasing after something to improve myself was not so healthy.
The paradigm shift
At one point in my life, I was in a long phase of an unmotivated rut. I had no idea why I had become that way, nor did I know how to get out of it, until when it just clicked. All my life I’ve had something to chase, someone to catch up to, something to beat and now I just didn’t find anyone pushing me forward. No one to compete with.
This brought a paradigm shift in my mindset. I wanted to push myself forward in whatever it may be with nothing to catch up to, nothing to chase. This I think is one of the greatest things I’ve learned in life, to just focus on myself and manifest my own lane.
Some might see this as a way of playing it safe and not pushing to our maximum potential, I thought so too. But let me try and explain this in a way that I wish someone did to my younger self.
Imagine running a 100mtrs Sprint, you’re chasing after the one who’s running the fastest, the one who’s leading. Putting your focus on that and chasing after that, trying to beat that, limits you to just that. But putting the focus beyond the finish line, and focusing on just the track you’re running in, makes you limitless. So just be, love the process and learn to love whatever the result maybe — be limitless. But most importantly, always manifest your own lane.
