This was week 139 of my Operation Melt journey that started with my goal to escape obesity and lose over 100 pounds in under a year. I launched the Operation Melt blog as a way to share my journey to both keep myself accountable and to help you as you work to crush your own goals. My hope is that something that I am doing will inspire you to try, will motivate you to keep going and will equip you to succeed in your own journey.

Competing only with myself

In 2020 so far I have been doing a lot of work with my trainer to get me to the point where I can do pull-ups. This involves a lot of shoulder, arm and, especially, back exercises. It also involves doing assisted pull-ups in each session. For those who have never seen an assisted pull-up machine, it is basically a stool that you put your knees on while doing pull-ups on a bar and the stool helps lift you up with a variable amount of weight. This means that you aren’t lifting your full body weight.

After lots of hard work I was finally able to get under 100 pounds of assistance this week. That means I am able to pull up over half of my body weight. At 95 pounds of assistance it was tough and I actually grunted at the end of my second rep as I was pulling hard with everything I had. But I did it, two full pull-ups with only 95 pounds of assistance.

I was pretty proud of myself and celebrating a little bit. That’s when I looked over to see somebody, who maybe weighs more than me, effortlessly doing 10 unassisted pull-ups. Really?!

There was a time, not that long ago, when this would have completely ended my celebration and it would have brought me down. I would have thought to myself “why I am celebrating, that person is way better than me and I have so much more work to do!” But not this time.

Instead of letting this bring me down I reminded myself that I am not in competition with the other person who is further ahead in their journey than I am. I am only competing with myself and, if I do better this week than I did last week, I am winning!

In every aspect of our lives there is going to be somebody better at something than we are. There are way better project managers than me. There are way faster runners. There are better leaders. There are better mentors. There are far better writers and way more suucessful authors. And, yes, there are people who are better at pull-ups. But this doesn’t mean I am losing. It just means I have the opportunity to get better and, if I do get better, I am winning.

We only lose when we stop improving ourselves not when we aren’t as good as somebody else.  Each of us has our own journey and we can’t compare that to others. So let’s choose to be athletes in all of the important aspects of our lives and work to achieve peak performance over time.

Thanks so much for reading. I hope that my experiences and my tips can help you achieve your own big goals. If we work together we can build a world where goals never die of loneliness!