I used to enjoy the video game Need for Speed.

One of the things you could do in that game is you could set it up so that a “ghost car” drove next to you and showed you how to perfectly do the race. You’d try to stay in line with a car that’s racing the ideal way.

And I often think of this metaphor when I see people living their lives, because they seem to often imagine they’re up against a “ghost person” as they’re living their lives. Whenever they’re doing something, they imagine the ideal version of it, they imagine some better version of what they’re doing.

And they constantly fall short of this ghost. They always think they “could have done it better”.

But unlike Need for Speed, life does not have a perfect way to run the race. Life does not have the absolute ideal way to take the corner or run up the straight.

And so imagining an ideal version of yourself just to make yourself feel bad accomplishes nothing!

The simple fact is, whatever you’re doing right now is the best you can possibly do. Now, you can learn from each attempt in order to improve future efforts, but that doesn’t mean that you could have done better when you first attempted it.

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