This reminds me of your tweet about escaping competition through authenticity.

It sounds like part of this is a search for who you are.

It's both a search and a recognition because sometimes when we search our egos,

we want to be something that we aren't and our friends and family are better at telling us

actually who we are or looking back at what we've done is a better indicator of who we are.

Peter Teal talks a lot about how competition is besides the point. It's counterproductive.

We're highly mimetic creatures. We copy what everybody else is doing around us. We copy

our desires from them. Everyone around me is a great artist. I want to be an artist.

If everyone around me is a great business person, I want to be a business person.

Everybody around me is a social activist. I want to be a social activist. That's where my

self-esteem will come from. You have to be a little careful when you get caught up in these

status games that you end up competing over things that aren't worth competing over.

So Peter Teal talks about how he was going to be a law clerk because he was in law school and

everybody around him wanted to be a law clerk for a Supreme Court justice or some famous judge.

And he got rejected and that's what made him go into business. So it helped him break out of a

lesser game into a greater game. So sometimes you just get trapped in the wrong game because you're

competing and the best way to escape competition to get away from the specter of competition,

which is not just stressful and nerve-racking but will often drive you to just the wrong answer.

The way to escape competition is to just be authentic to yourself. If you are fundamentally

building and marketing something that is just an extension of who you are, no one can compete with

you on that. Who's going to compete with Joe Rogan or Scott Adams? It's impossible. It's somebody

else going to come along and write a better deal, but no. It's someone going to compete with

...