How to Utilize Your Attention Effectively in Competition

In any venture you partake in, there will be competitors that you will be called to defeat.

This is a fact of life that, if realized early in your pursuits, is beneficial to understand. Know and accept that competition will follow you in almost every facet of life, and that you will be forced to learn how to win against your competition in order to see success on your chosen path.

A mistake, is to pay too much attention to those who compete against you. Know your competition enough to enable victory over them. There comes a point however, when your focus on your competition becomes detrimental to your own success. You start becoming an entity that makes them even more successful, as they begin demanding your time and energy be focused on them rather than your own tasks at hand.

Study your competition, what makes them successful, and what their weaknesses happen to be. Know your competition, only enough to limit their strengths and exploit their weaknesses. After you formulate a plan to do that, you must forget about them and what they do. Seize all attention, focus, and energy that you show towards them – as your attention now becomes a commodity you must control.

 


Your Attention is a Commodity


An important aspect of winning against competition is to never give them your undivided attention. You must direct your focus on your own venture, and make sure that you are your own worst critic. Relying on anyone else to critique what you’re working on is secondary to relying on yourself to know what needs to be done by analyzing in an unbiased way. The opinions others have should matter, but not be depended on to keep moving forward.

Analyze your efforts from a third-person’s perspective, be engulfed inside what you aim to do and practice forgetting about your competition. Compete with yourself day in and day out, and in order to grow your venture, project, business, or anything that you’re working on, you must be willing to focus all your energy and time into it.

Become the competitor that others watch, focus on, and study. Become the example for your competition to aim for, and remember the fact that there will be a target on your back. Keep moving and do not look back. If the eyes of your competitors rest longer on you than yours rest on them, it means you are ahead.

The longer you watch and study your competitors the more overwhelmed their efforts will make you feel. You must always remember that the results you see are an accumulation of work which you can be doing instead of focusing on what your competitors are doing.

We keep repeating this fact, but it is paramount to understand. Your competition grows in power with every second of attention and focus that you direct towards it. Treat your attention and focus as a commodity that your competition feeds off. Direct all your efforts towards your own ventures and forget about your competition once you’ve studied them enough to ensure victory.

Do not get overwhelmed by the results of others, as that is exactly what they need to happen in order to win against you. Do not be impressed by the results of others. Be cold when dealing with competitors, and do not for a second think that you must be hospitable to those who aim to come ahead of you in any domain.

Direct your attention towards what you are doing and learn how to improve your own efforts prior to keeping tabs on others. There is always something to improve about what is in front of you, so you should never focus on the improvements that others make instead.


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Disclaimer of Opinion: This article is presented only as opinion. It does not make any scientific, factual, or legal claims. Please critically analyze all claims made and independently decide on its validity.