I love competing.  I always have.  Both personally and professionally.  I especially love to win, but recently I’ve come to think differently about what winning means.  Many of the sports I play – which are largely individual competitions – are designed for losing.  There’s only one winner among the many who participate.  I’d sometimes look at the format of a competition and wonder if I should bother joining it when I have little to no chance of coming in first – and in fact, have a much greater chance of finishing last.  But what I’ve come to realize lately is that, in all these endeavors, the real competition is with myself.  That doesn’t mean I always win, but it does mean that, at times, it may appear that I was nowhere near the top of a leaderboard, yet I still crushed it!