Growing up, I didn’t really have a sense of wanting to be the “best” at something.  Sure, I always wanted to be good at what I did, but I didn’t have an overwhelming sense of needing to be the BEST.  I played clarinet and was happy to be in the top band, but didn’t need to be first chair.  I ran track but was perfectly fine with a top-three finish.  I made excellent grades, but I wasn’t a top graduate.  Do not confuse this with being apathetic or not being competitive.  I am extremely competitive IF there is a chance I can do well (if it’s something where I stink then I truly don’t care).  But competitiveness means I want to do well; it does NOT mean I have to actually win everything. 

The funny thing is, once I got to college it seemed like it was a weakness that I didn’t WANT to be the absolute best.  Everything is about winning.  Winning a game, an argument, a challenge, whatever.  And obviously, in a world where winning is the key, that means there are a LOT of losers – which is a totally ridiculous outlook.  In any given scientific analysis there is a bell curve.  If winning is the top of that curve, and losing is the bottom, then the vast majority of people are in the middle – the average.  For a very long time in college and beyond I observed a lot of people being unhappy with average or feeling like average is a bad thing, and I subscribed to that too.  No one ever brags about their “average” kid or their “average” waistline.  People brag about the things they do BETTER than average in life.  And I find this silly.  Average is not mediocre; mediocrity means something isn’t very good.  Average means it actually IS GOOD. 

The thing that made me think about this was my lunchtime run.  I understand many of you work in an office and say, “Lindsay, I can’t run at lunch, this is a silly discussion”, but I ran at lunch when I went to the office every day.  The difference was that I showered after my run when I worked in an office.  Nowadays I just sit in my sweat and enjoy the fact no one can smell it.  In Dallas I joined a gym near my office, ran three miles, showered, and went back to the office.  Then I ate my lunch at my desk – which is what a lot of people do anyway, they are simply working THROUGH lunch.  I refuse to do that.  I have worked at the same company for over ten years and I STILL block an hour on my calendar for lunch every day.  Sure, some days it moves or I only get half an hour, but I take that time for myself and I typically choose to run. 

Today’s run was super windy, but the temperature was amazing and the sun actually came out, so it was a win.  I ran about 3.25 miles because I got a late start from a meeting going long, but it was a good 3.25 miles.  I finished and said, “man, I wish I had run five” and took a pause to congratulate myself.  Congratulations on running ANY miles, instead of feeling like I hadn’t run enough miles.  Typically I run about an 8:30 mile (shorter if it’s not windy, longer if it’s a bomb cyclone), so I understand that I can probably fit in more miles than someone else on their lunch break (and have time to cool down before the next meeting).  But when people ask how I fit in running without it eating into my family life, the answer is I do it at lunch.  If you can’t run, go do some stairs, walk around the office building, pace the hallways of your school.  ANY miles are better than no miles, and anything that takes you out of the workday for some YOU time is time well spent. 

I worked for a software company in undergrad and we had a lot of smokers.  They would all go take smoke breaks about once an hour and I got fed up that they got all these perceived “breaks” when those of us NOT giving ourselves cancer had to tough it out inside.  So, I instituted “non-smoking smoke breaks”.  Every time the smokers went out, I grabbed a Frisbee and brought the non-smokers with me.  We had many a rousing game of Frisbee before the last cigarette was extinguished, got some sun, got some exercise, and had fun. 

These are easy moments you can create if you just do it.  The time it takes you to contemplate doing things like this can take way longer than actually picking up the Frisbee and tossing it at your coworker’s head.