A Little Competition Can Be a Good Thing | brokeGIRLrich
Welcome to another edition of financial analogies Mel thinks about while swimming.
If you also swim, or like parallels between fitness and finance, check out these other posts:
- How Running Is Like Personal Finance – Part I
- How Running is Like Personal Finance – Part II
- How Running is Like Personal Finance – Part III
- You Can Do More Than You Think You Can
I can be a little competitive. One of my best friend’s from college and I were chatting about her oldest kid the other day (she has 4!!!) and in his 2nd grade classroom, there’s a little chart for this penguin math game the kids play in their spare time and every time you beat a level, you get a star. There are 100 levels. Most of the kids in the class are around level 15-20. Her kid and two others in the class are around level 70, in a fierce dead heat competition to be the first to finish the penguin game. It’s October.
We both laughed pretty hard at this since back in the day (we also went to junior high and high school together), we both had the kinds of personalities where we would’ve been in a dead heat trying to beat each other too.
Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of reasons to be careful about competition, and there are definitely times, especially as a kid, I was the epitome of the kind of competitive monster a person can turn into.
But most of the time, with some fairly healthy self-esteem in general, competition can be a great motivator.
So, back to swimming.
I’ve been swimming on and off for the last 8 years. In the past, I would’ve considered it a major win to swim 200 meters without stopping. As a matter of fact, until recently, I’m not sure I ever did.
I had a mental block that usually every 100 meters, I had to stop for a second and catch my breath, check the time, adjust my goggles, stretch my legs and ponder life. You made it, I was making time for it.
I work with a lot of world class athletes – like folks who have been to the Olympics level of gymnasts. And, I hate to admit it, but I usually feel intimidated doing anything like exercising anywhere near them, because I’m pretty far from feeling particularly competent in any physical activity.
Well, despite that, in our last stop in Kuwait, there was a gorgeous top floor pool that was open 24 hours a day, with a hot tub right next to it. I went swimming after work most nights after we opened the show, but one day I made it down to the pool particularly quickly and about a dozen of my cast members were in the hot tub and two were swimming laps in the pool.
I sighed and thought, “Do I even go swim now? I’m just going to look like some flailing dork.”
But I was already up there, in my bathing suit, at nearly midnight. I was committed.
And with the imagined judgmental eyes of my cast upon me (in reality they probably didn’t even give a damn), I swam 750 meters without taking a break for the first time ever.
After gasping in a corner for a minute or two, I knocked out 400 meters more and climbed out of the pool. And the leader of our Russian Bar troupe, looked at me with rare approving Russian facial expressions, and told me he can’t swim for more than 5 minutes straight. And the entire hot tub full of Russians nodded their approval at my near 30 minutes straight of swimming.
And I felt like I had won the gold medal is recreational Kuwaitian pool swimming.
I also thought, why the heck have I never done that before? It wasn’t even hard.
And we can certainly go into the fact that I shouldn’t care at all about their approval either, but here we are. It was a nice ego boost in a slice of life that I don’t generally feel very confident in.
It reminded me of when I was training for the one and only 5K I ever did or will do and after I reached about 15 minutes straight of running it became sheer torture for me to do the increased times on the training app not because my legs hurt or I couldn’t breath well, though I would convince myself that was the case sometimes, but because I was bored and my brain just didn’t want to do the thing.
All of this made think of how a little competition/friendly pressure can be kind of awesome and push you to achieve even more.
I feel like we need more debt payoff games where you compete for stars like my friend’s kid or some money mentors passing on the occasional low key approval of your accomplishments.
They’re super helpful things for defeating a lot of the mental blocks on the way to any accomplishment – debt payoffs, large savings, investing goals.
And, incidentally, after shattering that mental block a few weeks ago in Kuwait, even on my own now, with no judgmental Russians in a nearby hot tub, I’m up to 1350 meters straight of swimming without stopping.
