What Olympic Losers Can Teach You About Comparison

Should an Olympic competitor feel disappointed when they don’t win a gold medal?

In the 2016 Olympics, Usain Bolt won the 100m sprint with a time of 9.81 seconds. In the same race, five other men finished with times under 10 seconds. 

As a mere mortal myself, when I hear that there are human beings who can run 100m in under 10 seconds, it’s hard to imagine feeling bummed out about a performance like that.

But naturally, each one of the men in that race wanted to take home a gold medal. The same desire to come out on top as compared to other people comes out in other areas of life: 

If your business doesn’t make as much profit as someone else’s in its first year, has that year been a failure? If you’re the last person in your group of friends to get married, does that mean there’s something wrong with you? If you spend time working on your physical health but your body doesn’t change, have you wasted that time?

If your 100m sprint time qualifies you for the Olympics but you don’t win a gold medal, are you going to feel proud or disappointed?

It depends on your mindset.

The measurements you use to determine your success or failure are based on your beliefs about what you think you "should" be able to achieve, which in this case includes whether you can run faster than those around you.

This cognitive measurement also includes whether you believe you’ve put in your maximum level of effort to make progress each day. It’s a lot easier to feel disappointed in yourself when you know you could have done better than if you feel like you put in everything you had. 

When you train for a race, you have no idea if your training times are faster than your opponents. You have no way of knowing where you stand until race day.

Blind to that information, how hard do you push yourself when you practice? When the only performance you have to measure progress is your own, do you aim to beat your own times?

There are not many people who, without the anticipation of comparison, would work as deliberately on their own.

A select few will not feel satisfied unless they’re continually improving, and even then, when shown that someone else is faster will feel disappointed in their own abilities.

But when we don’t even have a race coming up, we’ll still find a way to feel disappointed in ourselves…like when you say, “I’m x years old, and I still haven’t figured out how to eat like a normal person yet,” or, “Other people accomplished such-and-such in 6 months and I’m still working on this 6 years later.”

What are you racing for? The satisfaction of saying you did something at a younger age, or accomplished something in a faster time?

The only thing that the progress of others affects is how you feel when you compare yourself.

Someone else’s results have no bearing on your ability to do well, to make progress, and to perform at your best.

If you’re running a literal race, evaluate your efforts and decide if there’s more you can—and want—to do. And if you’re not running a race…evaluate your efforts and decide if there’s more you can and want to do.

The only loss will be if you’re making excuses, wasting time on tasks that aren’t important, or ruminating on what someone else is up to.

Note: This article was originally published on February 8, 2019 and was revised on January 13, 2023.