There’s a quote attributed to Steve Jobs that lives rent free in my head. “People who are genuinely great at something don’t compete. They don’t care about being compared to others because they’re so deep in their own lane that comparison would be a waste of time. They just do their thing.”
A photo says the same thing without a word. It’s from the 2016 Olympics in Rio, the 200-meter butterfly final. Michael Phelps is driving toward the wall with his eyes straight ahead. In the next lane, South African swimmer Chad le Clos has turned his head to look at Phelps. Phelps won. Le Clos finished fourth.
What makes the photo even better is that Phelps wanted that race badly. Le Clos had beaten him for gold four years earlier, and Phelps came back to that event partly to settle the score. He was competitive. He just wasn’t looking at his competition when it counted.
For the first half of my career, I was the swimmer looking sideways.
Early on, I was convinced I knew the formula for getting promoted in my police department. If I wanted to move up, surely I needed to be on the operational trajectory. The chiefs had come up through SWAT, and their teammates always seemed to have the advantage when the lists came out. People promote in their own likeness. So I watched who was getting ahead and measured myself against them. I wasn’t a gang guy or a SWAT guy. I was a community policing officer, a domestic violence detective, and someone who taught conflict resolution and leadership. On the scoreboard I kept in my head, none of that counted for much.
When I was a lieutenant, the commander position opened up. Second in command. Ten of us were competing for it. I was younger than my colleagues and had only been a lieutenant for two years, and the little voice in my head got busy. Maybe I really did need to be in SWAT gear to be taken seriously. Did I honestly think I had a shot? That voice was worse than any noise from the sidelines because it knew all my insecurities.
There was noise from the sidelines, too. One of the other lieutenants was telling anyone who would listen that I didn’t deserve the job. He’d tormented me for most of my career. As the promotion approached, my allies told me he was building a plot to get me disciplined over an infraction that didn’t exist.
I was exhausted from walking that tightrope, so I asked him to meet with me. Just the two of us in a little office. I pointed out the obvious. We were not friends. Then I told him what I believed: he thought I was less worthy of the job because our careers had taken different paths. His was tactical. Mine wasn’t. That didn’t make him more deserving. I was proud of what I’d contributed to our department, and I knew I was just as worthy as he was.
He conceded. He actually agreed with me.
I walked out of that office different than I walked in. For years, my confidence had been shaky because I believed I needed to be like them to be taken seriously. Sitting across from a man I didn’t respect and saying out loud what I’d built, I finally understood. My contributions were just as important as his. They were just different. I didn’t need the SWAT gear. I never had.
A week later, my chief called me into his office and told me I was the new commander. I don’t remember shaking his hand. I remember hyperventilating in a bathroom stall in the women’s locker room. My chief was a SWAT guy, too, but he understood what four of the five chiefs I worked for never did. Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, said it best: “Never hire or promote in your own image. It is foolish to replicate your strength and idiotic to replicate your weakness.” My chief chose diversity of thought over his own reflection, and I’ve carried that gift ever since.
Here’s what that season taught me. I compete with only one person in my life: myself. Once I stopped looking at what everyone else was doing and committed to getting better, something weird and wonderful happened. I never missed a chance to take another class, further my education, or stretch myself. Pretty soon my résumé was bigger than anyone else’s, and it positioned me to become the first female lieutenant, commander, and eventually chief in my organization. I didn’t get there by beating anyone. I got there by turning my head back around.
Now let’s talk about you.
You have a template in your head, too. Somebody built it for you. A boss, a parent, an industry, the person two desks over who always seems one step ahead. You’ve measured yourself against it for so long that you don’t notice you’re doing it. That’s being blind. You call it ambition. But you’re running someone else’s race and wondering why you never feel like you’re winning.
Then one day you notice. Someone else gets the promotion or the seat at the table, and you feel that familiar tightening in your chest. You finally see the scoreboard you’ve been keeping. That’s awareness. Most people stay right there, aware and stuck.
The moment of reckoning is when you ask the harder question. Whose standard am I trying to meet? And what have I been dismissing in myself because it doesn’t look like theirs?
If you don’t answer that question, the crisis comes quietly. You spend years contorting yourself into a shape that was never yours, replicating someone else’s strengths while your own sit on the bench. You might even get the job. You just won’t recognize the person who got it.
Stop looking at the lane next to you. Get so deep into your own that comparison stops being worth your time.
This is your moment of reckoning. Step into it.
Photo: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
