The enemy within

I have been listening to a lot of motivational stuff recently so I am not quite sure where I heard of this from, but I found it was something I resonate with. It talks about the enemy within. He is a figment of your imagination, he is just like you in all likeliness, born at the same time, with the same looks, same gifts and everything, but then there is a key difference between you two, and that is he does everything he needs to do when he needs to do it. He does it better than you and he doesn't want you to do it so he uses psychology to make you tired and tries to give you a reason to doubt yourself and feel like you can't do it.

When I first heard it it sounded absurd to me but then upon further reflection, though somewhat delusional it is actually a delusion that can be helpful so I realized it is not so bad.

Your villain doesn't want to see you succeed as much as him but you're not going to let him win so you battle him. How do you battle him? You battle him by doing what you're supposed to do when you need to do it as much as you need to do it. Truth be told we all know or at least we have an idea of what we think is the best thing to do to succeed and a lot of the time we let laziness, fear and doubt cloud our minds and stop us from doing them. This is the enemy within trying to stop us and we must not let him win. He is the only person we are competing with, everyone else just serves as a motivation to us.

So one question that came to mind was how do we defeat him? Well, the answer to that is that you can never conquer him, that's the interesting part. He keeps getting better each time but as we compete with him we also become better versions of ourselves. On some days we actually beat him momentarily, and how do we do that? By smashing a record we have set previously. On those days we are allowed to celebrate because we have outdone ourselves and beat our competitor. On other days we work towards reaching our best every time.

I find this mindset quite good because each time in other to beat him we have to do better than the last time. The bar keeps getting lifted and we keep becoming better.

I have been trying to apply this to my daily life as of late. Competing with myself in everything I do and trying to be better each time. I must admit it's not always easy, especially with some things where it's not necessarily easy to measure your progress. But I believe as long as I'm putting in the effort it'll be worth it.

THANKS FOR READING

_{Cover image by Elijah Hiett from Unsplash}

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