A gift from Seth Godin.

Earlier this week, I wrote an article suggesting that before you judge a person's point of view, it's important to fully understand and consider the experiences, belief-systems, and cultural influences that may inform their perspectives.

This morning, Seth Godin published a blog-post titled, "The other person is always right". It was a different take on the same idea.

His version is much better.

It's much more vivid, and yet, also much more concise. (Seth only needed 55 words; I clearly felt I needed more than three times the verbiage.) It delivers the same general idea in a more compelling fashion. The title of his piece is even more interesting than what I chose to call mine. It's better in every way, without question.

Am I surprised that Seth wrote the better post? Not even a little bit. He's a brilliant marketer and prolific blogger I've admired for almost two decades; I have many of his published works, and he once even shipped me a box of autographed material after an unfortunate encounter at a conference I attended. He's an undisputed master in the art of blogging, and somehow manages to deliver an insightful and inspiring new post every single day. (Every single day! I've yet to achieve a five-day writing streak.)

Am I disappointed that someone else was able to independently come up with the same idea I had earlier, then proceed to deliver it in a far more convincing fashion? Not even a little bit. In fact, I'm thrilled.

Because Seth Godin gave me a gift: I just got a free writing lesson from one of the best bloggers on the Internet.

If communicating this particular idea most effectively was a competition, then I just got handily beat by Seth Godin. But any time you get beat at anything, you have two choices. You can choose to complain, make excuses, and try to convince the world (and yourself) that you actually won. Or you can choose to set aside your pride and ego, carefully examine the results, and look for ways to improve for the next time. One of my favourite quotes captures this second choice well: "I don't lose. I either win, or I learn."

I had an idea, and wrote a post to communicate it. I thought I had done a decent job, but the post didn't achieve the number of views some of my other articles have earned.

But by carefully comparing my post to Seth's (much better) version, I can see what I might have done differently to make my writing more effective, and use that knowledge to be a better writer.

That's a tremendous gift, but only because I cared enough to unwrap it.

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