"Being the best"-mentality

What's up Steemians, hope you've had a good day so far. The people who follow my posts have probably noticed that most of the topics I write about are quite personal, and once again I'd like to talk about something that has been a big part of my life.

Before I start, I just want to say that I'm all about trying your best and doing everything to be the best you can be. Sometimes this just goes too far.

"I have to be the best"
I've always been pushing myself to be the best in the things I do, especially school. In the first few years of school I noticed I can easily get good grades with moderate effort. Once I started getting good grades often, they didn't feel good anymore because I got used to them, so I wanted to get better. I started putting more work into school and getting nearly perfect grades more and more often. As the years passed I was keeping my level, just didn't notice that I was already getting used to the nearly perfect grades.

Fast forward to 2015: I was doing my first year in university studying to be an engineer, still keeping my almost perfect level but putting way too much effort into my studies. For the first time in my life, many courses had big group assignments that pretty much dictated the grades so I couldn't affect them as much as I wanted to. I was now getting "just good" grades from some courses, and oh boy did it feel bad. I felt like I was doing bad, even though I was still doing way above average. This in turn caused even more stress, which started to get way too intense for anyone. I was pushing myself to be perfect even though it wasn't possible anymore.

Sometimes "just good" is good enough
I'm currently finishing my third year and still have one year left before I graduate. Slowly but surely I'm starting to feel like even I can sometimes be "just good" and not being perfect is sometimes healthy. Don't get me wrong, I still have by far the best GPA in my class and I still get very good grades. However, I'm not stressing about them that much anymore. I've made it to the point where I try my best and see where it takes me. No "what if I get a bad grade" anymore. It's kind of sad that I only realized it at this point, but better late than never.

Only the best are admired
Sometimes it feels like life itself is a huge competition where only the best can be looked up to. This to me is a double-edged sword. It's always good to have dreams and people to admire, but at the same time the people who are good (but not the best) at many things get no attention. Some people are awesome at dozens of different things, but usually get no recognition since they are not the absolute best in some particular thing.

What do kids learn from this all? Choose a thing and be the best at it if you want to be liked. This of course is a bit exaggerated, but you probably see where I'm going with this. Competition itself is not bad, the problem is that the ones who aren't the best are not told that it's okay. That it doesn't make you a loser if you're not the best.

So what to do?
Just try to be more forgiving to yourself when you find yourself in a situation where you're not the best. Be the best you can be, but that's it. That's enough. There's no point in comparing yourself to someone else. I made the mistake of trying to be the best, and I'm still struggling with it.

And parents, make sure your kids know that they are still a valuable part of society even if they're not the best at something. Give them credit for what they do, no matter how good they are.

That's all for now. And as always, this is my personal opinion so feel free to disagree.

Peace.
-R