You don't have to outrun the bear...

Lots of people motivate themselves with the mantra that someone is always better than them at something, or that someone else is always working harder. But a lot of times I make myself feel better by insisting that there's someone else out there who's worse off than I am in any given situation.

Every time I sit down to tackle an adult task, usually involving my health insurance in some capacity I think to myself, "Someone out there is dumber than I am, and is trying to do this same exact thing." I never really think about the possibility that they just give up and don't end up doing what they need to do. I just imagine that they somehow succeeded so there's no reason I shouldn't.

It's also never really occurred to me how lame of a "pep talk" this is for myself until just now. But I've already started writing so I've sort of committed to being lame for the day. Oh well--can't win 'em all! (Again, lame.)

Anyways, this sort of logic works for all sorts of things. Here's a few examples:

When getting a pedicure: "I'm sure they've seen grosser feet."
When writing my senior thesis in college: "Someone more clueless than I has to have done this before."
When running a road race: "There will be slower runners."
When taking a test: "I'm sure someone did worse than I did."

So, I use this line of reasoning a lot, and lately I've started wondering how many times I've actually been wrong. I really bank on the fact that I'm at least mediocre in every situation I encounter...but maybe I'm not.

Someone has to have the grossest feet a pedicurist has ever seen. What if it's me?

Someone has to be the dumbest person to ever try to get a referral from their doctor. That could very well be me.

Is there someone out there keeping a tally of all the times I've incorrectly assumed that there's gotta be someone somewhere in the world that's more screwed than I am?

(There were definitely a few car rides in my life before we used GPS where I wasn't able to comfort myself with my lame mantra, and actually thought to myself, "I am the most lost person in America right now, and quite possibly even the world." As you can tell, I get really irrational and dramatic when I get lost. All the sudden it's like, rules of the road no longer apply, and I just start taking U-turns whenever the hell I feel like it.)

In summation, what I'm trying to say is that while, with some things it's worth trying to finish first or be the best, I'm of the opinion that a lot of times it would suffice to just not finish last or be the worst.


"You don't have to outrun the bear--just your slowest friend."
-Unattributed

(P.S. In case you were wondering, [which most of you probably weren't] I did some research on whether I should be saying "dumber than me" or "dumber than I"/ "worse off than me" or "worse off than I" and while I thought it'd just be a quick job for Google, turns out that I actually stumbled into one of the grammar world's most hotly debated topics. Apparently people have been fighting about this since the 1700's. The rule I decided to go by was that if "am" is either used or implied than you use "I," like this, "Surely there is someone out there dumber than I [am]." The great advice that the website gave me was to just avoid these types of sentences altogether. But, you know, I like to live dangerously.)