Know Your Competition

I remember when I was in ninth grade I took a typing class. I knew I wanted to be a reporter and I knew that I wanted to not hunt and peck the keys. (I worked with many amazing editors who did hunt and peck, by the way, and they did just fine. But for me, I wanted to be a fast typist so I didn't have to think about the keys I was hitting.

My class didn't have a cool name like "keyboarding" and I was one of very few (if any?) males in the class. But it was a good class and it did the trick. I learned how to type fairly fast. I typed my share of "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," which covers every letter in the alphabet.

I sat in one of the middle rows of class and fairly early on, I was one of the faster typists. This is the days of the old manual typewriters with the bell that dings after every line. (That was such a satisfying sound that we don't get using the computer!). So my return carriage would be dinging pretty often. But here was one person in the class that would type faster than me. The return carriage was flying, ding, ding, ding.

It challenged me to get better, type faster.

Ding.

How is this person doing this that fast in this class? I'd think to myself. Well, toward the end of the semester, I decided to look over my shoulder to get a glimpse of "the competition."

It was the teacher. I was competing with the typing teacher!

It reminded me of being in junior high. In my class there were a few of us who were the "funniest," competing with each other for laughs. Really, there was two of us and we each had our own sidekicks (Laurel had Hardy, Tommy Smothers had his brother Dick, Dean Martin had Jerry Lewis).

Well, my competitor each week would be coming in each Monday with some "new material." Pretty funny stuff. And I was constantly trying to get my own laughs. I held my own. It would be years and years later that I was watching an old Saturday Night Live and realized THIS was the material my classmate was copying. (I wasn't allowed to watch SNL then. Still not!).

I was competing with the writers and actors of SNL.

The moral of these stories: Know the competition. Know them well. Know what they do and how they do it and what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are (that you can strengthen). And know what their strengths and weaknesses are.

Then, play to your strengths.