COMPARISON AND COMPETITION
Isn’t the Sky big enough?
I like to think that I am a sticker for timing. I strongly hold that universal secrets are tied to understanding times and that an attempt no matter how well made would always fail if it is too prompt or too late. It must be on the dot. Time is never approximated or even roughly estimated. Most decisions I have failed at have been because I did not heed to my time warning. I schedule when to make a post on my status, when to post on a medium and even when to ask out a love interest. I wait for the nudge before taking any action. My friend Gafar doesn’t care so much about it. I like to think he is led more by his self-belief than by opportune moments. For him, the opportune time is the time he chooses. No nudge, no prompt, just choice.
The moral lesson should revolve round courage and wisdom. Make of it what you wish.
When Burna boy released the hit album “Twice as tall” the wave was epic and loud that I would assume that no artiste would dare release an album in that month but what do I know? In that week, DJ Tunez, Wizkid, Adekunle Gold and Omahlay released “Pami” and even more, both Adekunle Gold and Fireboy released their albums in that same week. In the space of 7 days, we had 3 hit albums and one single. (14/8–21/8) all making waves at the same time. For me, it was a seismic shift on my belief on timing. Amidst the hype of twice as tall, who would have thought other albums would make their way through the hype.
It lingered in my head the courage Fireboy and Adekunle Gold had to go toe to toe with such hype. Not me. Not in this life. What I failed to realize was that the moral of the story was not the timing but that the sky was big enough for everyone to fly. For them, it wasn’t a competition, it was simply three geniuses understanding that the success of one does not make the other less successful. Not in a world of how many billion people; not in a world where two opposite rules could lead two racially different people to the same destination.
Sometime in April, Brymo took a low on Wizkid, Davido and Burna boy; self-acclaiming himself as being the best artiste in the continent. To be honest, that is not where the problem lies. Burna does it, Davido does it and so does Wizkid. Being skilled in art comes with an intoxicating self-belief and praise but with Brymo, he did it at the pleasure of deriding others. The irony here is that Brymo sings with such flair, such wisdom and such truth but here he was falling beneath his own standards because he became too concerned with the lane of others instead of his lane. Every man can be king in his own kingdom and being king in one’s kingdom does not take away the kingship of the others. Brymo lost grip of this powerful fact the moment he proclaimed his dominance of a sky too large for one man: a sky too ridiculous for personal possession.
INTERLUDE
Art in any form requires effort. It is not the easiest of things to do — to conjure a thought and translate them into form for human consumption is a very herculean task. Be it music, acting, writing or any creation at all. For every creation of art, there’s the fine genius moment which springs forth the art. This is why I find it irritating for anyone to dismiss any creation. There’s no intelligence in not understanding that one’s preference and perception are very relative and sentimental to oneself and that one’s dislike for a creation of art has nothing on the value of the art.
Burna boy’s album “Twice as tall” is not only profound because Burna sings with such effortless dexterity but because his lyrics carry with them a gospel, a critical tale of human exegesis. When he refers to his art as spiritual, who can deny? His track “No fit vex” is a reminder of how our lives are connected to different struggles and how sometimes, we lose ourselves to these struggles.
In context, Ambitions are addictive, it is bemusing how we do not even realize this. Humans live with budding ambitions, we all crave to be something — wishing to be more than we are — wishing to be the best. Reality check presents the triangular nature of life. We are often reminded that we are not at the top of this triangle and so we aspire to go up in the triangular scale. At the bottom, there’s so much told about how it gets comfortable with every upward climb. We suddenly exist in an aspirational axis that is cursed with comparison and competition.
THE DISCORD
While still being hopeful, we are struck with how some of us have been fast paced. There’s that friend working in a top firm and here you are scrawling with one chamber around the block of a slump. God must hate you and the devil must have you as a pet project in progress. You recount when you had 69 and got a B and your friend who you considered less-smarter than you got a lucky 70 A. what is Life?
“Our humanness reveals our vulnerabilities in unconscious ways. Whenever we interact with others, we judge them and whenever we make such judgments, we compare them with ourselves, other people, or internalized standards.”
Basically, when we say this person is smart, rich, tall or short, it comes from an unconscious place of comparison. Often against ourselves or some evaluated standard. The unconscious effect of this is that we become less valuable in ourselves, conceding to a loss that is inexistent and slowly we begin to lose hope, we begin to resign to fate. Slowly, we gravitate to a place of failure. This is where we miss it and this where I hope to inspire you.
An infinite truth is that no man is dreamless. We all aspire, we all wish, we all crave. What we lack is faith, drive and willingness. We wake daily with our valid dreams but somehow we are forlorn on how to go about them. We don’t trust our potentials to be more and somehow the willingness to make those dreams a reality is affected. We relegate success to luck and reserve success to those whom we perceive to be geniuses while concluding that we are just one of the many others and can’t be more. A lot of these happen in our unconscious state. We only play out this script by our acts of laziness to fulfil our dreams and aspiration.
The truth is: maybe sometime we are not as good enough for the top, maybe not too good for even our dreams but what we owe ourselves is the effort and not necessarily the result. For me the problem has never been my fear of failing but in whether I gave my all. I try to be passionate about the things I do. When I fail, I ask myself if I gave my all. For everytime I answer in the affirmative, I let go of it and when I answer in the negative I hang in that regret a little longer than required.
The message here is simple, 100% effort is all the faith, drive and willingness needed to get closer to those probably unattainable dreams. J Cole profoundly puts it
“I’ve learned that a fundamental part of my anatomy is this: I have a relentless drive. When I really want to achieve something, I dig deep and find the work ethic, the foresight, and the patience needed to make it happen.”
In doing this, we become less bothered by how far others have gone and become more concerned with how much we have given to our dreams. Adekunle Gold and Fireboy knew this. It is not a competition against one another. I see successful people tell their stories with victorious tones accompanied by determined declarations that they had won the battle finally. Battle against who exactly? Battle against the factors that stood as barriers to their destination, and not against others whom life has only programmed as necessary competitors — products of circumstances sort of. When we share stories of success, we should learn to embrace the process, befriend those who did not hit the same target rather than classifying them as victims who became so only because we triumphed. In accessing oneself, one must not deride another. Life is not a competition against oneself; it is not a competition against one another. It is simply an attempt to fly in a sky big enough for Tom, Dick and You.
