It’s not about winning or losing, it’s about getter 1% better each day

By Jason Safford (Excerpted from Winning with Exceptionalism)

Competition is often misunderstood. Too many people look at whether they are winning or losing and not at whether they are improving. If you focus on how you are improving your performance each time, eventually there will only be a competition with your last performance. That should be your end goal.

When you focus directly on a goal, what happens?

You start worrying about making mistakes. Anxiety becomes your enemy and failure and rejection start to consume your thoughts. You become desperate to win because you are afraid to lose. You start feeling guilty about success!

These kinds of thoughts are incredibly distracting!

Most people fail because of these thoughts overwhelm them and they freeze into inaction. I know firsthand how this can happen. I have failed many times because I was overwhelmed with negative thoughts.

When you focus on the process of achieving your goal, you get to have fun instead. You begin to look forward to each aspect of how your mission will be completed. You get interested in the details and excited about results from every effort made.

The goal becomes a game you try to master each and every time. Learning becomes the focus. How you improve in the process becomes the result and winning becomes a byproduct.

When you adopt this mindset of falling in love with the process, feelings of anxiety, guilt, and fear start to disappear. I lose myself in the work and my self-doubt and self-consciousness become non-existent.

My enthusiasm becomes my driving force. This increases my energy to remain disciplined and focused on getting things done every day. And little by little, my passion for my mission becomes

When success comes — usually far faster and unexpectedly — it becomes a bonus! My real reward has always been the learning and discovering how to get better results from the process.