Thoughts on competition

2 things really scare me, regret and not being ambitious enough. I don’t have many regrets but the one that I tend to dwell on is sport. I played at a decent level but just stopped after a multi-year illness. I never went back to high level competition. Reflecting on my life now I don’t actively try and compete in anything, even though competing is where I derived most of my meaning and purpose from earlier in life. As a kid being good at things was important and competition gave me a marker for comparison.

Some of the lack of competition is because comparison to peers use to be very simple and the games have changed or we stopped playing. Who won the game, who scored higher in the test, etc. But now as we transition to take on more responsibities in life how do you compare anything? All comparisons seems arbitrary to an extent. So now the options in front of me seem to be, navigate the transition in what you derive meaning from, find different things to compete in, go back to what you use to compete in or find ways to compete with yourself.

Perhaps it is not competition that I’m missing it’s structure. Competitions are usually structured but structures are not necessarily competitions. For instance it is generally easier to focus in an office because of the imposed structure and accountability. But what about for things outside of work how do you decide what structure to set up or if it is sufficient? I guess you just start experimenting.