Quotes & Sayings About Competing Against Yourself

My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room for mistakes when you're competing against the sun for a person's attention. — Rosecrans Baldwin

A fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don't work harder because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy - but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED digits — Neal Stephenson

My father offered me a dollar for every pound I would lose as a kid. It didn't work. And it doesn't really work in the long run. Who are you competing against? It's you. You need to be doing this for you and only you. — Richard Simmons

I think it is just the way he has changed the game overall and his own game because there are so many situations he has faced. He is now competing mostly against himself, like most great cricketers do. I think he has mastered all of them. The only challenge he has is to beat himself every time he walks out there because he has done almost everything. — Kumar Sangakkara

I heard - " I began.
"I let you hear," he cut me off.
I shut my mouth, closed the door, and leaned back against it. The corners of his lips turned up as if at some private amusement, and for a moment I thought we were having one of those silent conversations.
You think it's safe to close yourself in with the Beast?
If you think I'm afraid of you, you're wrong.
You should be afraid.
Maybe you should be afraid of me. Go ahead, piss me off, Barrons. See what happens.
Little girl thinks she's all grown up now.
His mouth moved into a smile that I've grown familiar with over the past few months, shaped of competing tensions: part mockery, part pissed off, and part turned on. Men are so complicated. — Karen Marie Moning

When movies work or a TV series, when they really work, it's because of the collaborative effort. Competition is the death knell for anything, in my opinion. Especially in Hollywood. When actors are competing against each other, or when directors are competing against actors, it's usually the beginning of the end. — Rocky Carroll

I learned how to play football and I got pretty good at it. I enjoyed being on a team with other girls. In Hollywood, girls are always competing against one another, so it was nice to be on a team with other girls for a change. — Nikki Ziering

It's not really about the competition. Your biggest challenge in a race is yourself. You're often racing against time. You're frequently running everything through your mind. You're always competing against preconceived ideas. It's not really the person next to you that you worry about. — Summer Sanders

You're competing against people in a state of flow, people who are truly committed, people who care deeply about the outcome. You can't merely wing it and expect to keep up with them. Setting aside all the safety valves and pleasant distractions is the first way to send yourself the message that you're playing for keeps — Seth Godin

The cinema industry is competing against everything else people can do on a Friday or Saturday night. If they don't have a good time, you're going to lose them to something else. So much of what we do is trying to make the Alamo experience special. — Tim League

We last longer if we compete against ourselves for the good of others instead of competing against others for the good of ourselves. — Simon Sinek

We are alive for a certain period of time in any given lifetime. We are competing against time. It is a race to see if we can wake up before we go to sleep again. That is the challenge. — Frederick Lenz

Shooting in real-life situations helps actors because they're competing against the noise and the wind. Out of that comes things that shift and change, in terms of tone, but not in terms of re-honing the whole sequence. — Tony Scott

Philanthropic leaders genially speak of complementing government, not competing with it as if monopoly were good and competition destructive-thus unwittingly conspiring against the public interest. — Richard Cornuelle

An outcast has all possibilities of greatness..
Rejected, he has nothing to lose while using his talents..
Competing with his own talents and only against himself... — Abha Maryada Banerjee

When you reach that elite level, 90 percent is mental and 10 percent is physical. You are competing against yourself. Not against the other athlete. — Dick Fosbury

When you're young, you develop ways to win, and you think they will always work, but then you get to the top, competing against the other top athletes, and sometimes things don't work. — Lindsey Vonn

If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover. — David Graeber

Life is never more fun than when you're the underdog competing against the giants. — Ross Perot

You will be competing against athletes from many nations. But, most important, you are competing against yourself. All we expect is for you to do your very best, to push yourself just one second faster, one notch higher, one inch further. — Ronald Reagan

The key then is to find your own mountain, otherwise you will be competing with people who are not even in your event, and running up against the 'shoulds' and 'oughts' of that world, and the inevitable frustration and depression and feelings of failure. A person can be complete or incomplete, but one thing is sure, he cannot be someone else. — George A. Sheehan

Be the one you're competing against — Thabiso Monkoe

I think we're really good about pushing each other in practice and we have high tempo and I feel like we have some of the best players in the world so just competing against one another and getting in there and pushing each other around and getting ready for that physical style of game coming up, we have to play hard and pretend it's a game. — Cherie Piper

It's always hard to find the best friends in the locker room because we are all competing against each other - but the real friends you are going to definitely find off the court because we are competitors in between. — Tomas Berdych

It took a lot of time for me to understand that I'm not competing against anybody but myself. — Luis Gerardo Mendez

For society to function some kind of reasonable balance has to be stuck between the competing interests of creditors and debtors. Although the mandate of the Bank of Canada was to maintain a delicate balance between encouraging growth and fighting inflation, the Bank opted to focus exclusively on fighting inflation. In doing so it came down heavily in favour of those with financial assets to protect, and against those whose primary need was employment. — Linda McQuaig

You can't take up golf on a whim and find yourself competing against Tiger Woods in the Masters six months later. — Richard Roeper

What you really are afraid of is that you're competing against somebody who is rich and irrational. I mean, it used to be a given, a saying in the industry: Don't ever bid against Rupert Murdoch for anything Rupert wants, because if you win you lose. You will have paid way too much. — John C. Malone

Of course, competition against others is there, but it should serve to challenge you. To show you how well other people are competing against themselves. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

When you're part of something special, you have to cherish it and defend it against many outside distractions and temptations. But nothing is more potent or deceptive than the competing interests or another great opportunity. In those moments when priorities clash, always stay guided by your values, not your perceived necessities. Necessities exist in a state of mind that will not last, whereas values are transcendent and enduring. — Adam Braun

There will be ribbons in a range of colors with placings noted and records kept. Ribbons aren't worth much more than that; they're only a symbol. It's your partnership that mattered. That the two of you spent weekends challenging yourselves to improve, always competing against your last show, and balancing winning and losing into a place of faith and trust. That the two of you built a special relationship that made a difference, if not in the huge world, certainly in your own hearts. You persevered through joy and pain, thrill and dread, and in the end, there was a place that the two of your shared. Ribbons say it was worth celebrating. In a world where horses struggle, suffer, and die for the whims of humans, it says that you saw past the surface and shared breath and heart with another soul. You lifted your eyes higher. — Anna Blake

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you're competing against a lot of people. But if you're willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you're now competing against a fraction of those people ... Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue — Jeff Bezos

Trusting in Jesus requires that you surrender every competing hope. For the Israelites, it was the call to abandon the worship of any other god and entrust their lives to the one true God (see Ex. 20:3). For the disciples Peter, James, and John, it meant surrendering their livelihoods as fishermen the moment after pulling in their most profitable catch ever and following Jesus (Luke 5:11). For each of us, it means trusting his promise of forgiveness and not working to try to pay off our own debt. It means trusting his cleansing and not hiding in shame (1 John 1:9). It means clinging to God's steadfast love, his grace upon grace to us in Jesus Christ, as our only hope, the only true remedy against idolatry.40 — Mike Wilkerson

Although in skating you compete with other people, anyone who achieves a certain level of success is first and foremost competing against themselves. And for me the idea that I could always do better, learn more, learn faster, is something that came from skating. But I carried that with me for the rest of my life. — Vera Wang

They all start competing against Lincoln as the greatest president. And the [library] building becomes the symbol, the memorial to that dream. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

I'm competing, Kennedy," he breathes against my neck. "And I'm going to win."
Zart, Lindy (2014-11-20). Roomies (p. 154). Kindle Edition. — Lindy Zart

I was never happy that my injuries cut my career short and ultimately forced my decision to step away from tennis. I have enjoyed my time away from the court, a period that has allowed me to experience a different side of life. However, I miss the game and the challenge of competing at the highest level of tennis, and I want to gauge whether I can stay healthy and compete against today's top players. — Martina Hingis

My dad always told me to play hard and know that the people you're competing with and against are working just as hard or harder. So don't let them out-work you. — Tim Hudson

everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you are competing against a lot of people. But if you are willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you are now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five — Gerardo Giannoni

When one doesn't want the limelight, but is also creative in developing whatever it is they are, then you can have two equal people that aren't competing against each other. I think when you are in the same field, it's difficult to leave it outside and not compete. Then when the doors are closed; that pervades everything. — Tori Amos

But for a younger generation of conservative operatives who would soon rise to power ... They were true believers who meant what they said, whether it was 'No New Taxes' or 'We are a Christian Nation.' In fact, with their rigid doctrines, slash-and-burn style, and exaggerated sense of having been aggrieved, this new conservative leadership was eerily reminiscent of some of the New Left's leaders during the sixties. As with their left-wing counterparts, this new vanguard of the right viewed politics as a contest not just between competing policy visions, but between good and evil. Activists in both parties began developing litmus tests, checklists of orthodoxy, leaving a Democrat who questioned abortion increasingly lonely, any Republican who championed gun control effectively marooned. In this Manichean struggle, compromise came to look like weakness, to be punished or purged. You were with us or you were against us. You had to choose sides. — Barack Obama

The principle is competing against yourself. It's about self-improvement, about being better than you were the day before. — Steve Young

You first compete with yourself before competing against others; if you cannot beat your last best result, do not be surprised if it seems difficult to compete against external competitors. — Archibald Marwizi

When the corporation's investment capital becomes impatient for growth, good money becomes bad money because it triggers a subsequent cascade of inevitable incorrect decisions. Innovators who seek funding for the disruptive innovations that could ultimately fuel the company's growth with a high probability of success now find that their trial balloons get shot down because they can't get big enough fast enough. Managers of most disruptive businesses can't credibly project that the business will become very big very fast, because new-market disruptions need to compete against nonconsumption and must follow an emergent strategy process. Compelling them to project big numbers forces them to declare a strategy that confidently crams the innovation into a large, existing, and obvious market whose size can be statistically substantiated. This means competing against consumption. — Clayton M Christensen

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg.
Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter ... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold ... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle. — Alan Moore

I think when you talk about competing against others, the problem is that you refer to something that's been done already and try to beat it. — Shigeru Miyamoto

Principles describe rights; policies describe goals. But rights are trumps. They have a 'threshold weight' against community goals. They should not be squashed by a competing community goal. — Raymond Wacks

Being doped is a pleasure you pay for. There was always opium there for the people
in the end it tainted their whole faith. If the Church had not always stood so watchfully behind the ruling powers, there would not have been such attacks against everything it stood for
although of course it may have been competing with them for the first place among the rulers, as in the Middle Ages. Whenever it was a question of keeping the serfs, and then the paid slaves down, the dope-dealers came unfailingly to the help of the oppressors. — Ernst Bloch

The key to competing and surviving against Wal-Mart is to focus your business into a niche or pocket where you can leverage your strengths in the local marketplace. — Michael Bergdahl

I just like to play anything that's competitive. If I'm not competing against somebody, then I might as well play something I can enjoy. — Seimone Augustus