Having walked this same path, this blog resonates with me. To others reading, however, I would warn against the particular solution the author suggests.

I can’t help but notice the author’s attempts to find new external benchmarks against which to measure himself. I did the exact same thing, literally down to “what if I ran a marathon?”

It worked well temporarily, but it didnt get at the core issue for me: my listlessness stemmed from a disbelief in the value of the benchmark, not the inability to measure up. 10 miles vs 11 didn’t matter; what matters is doing something i believe is valuable. At the end of the day, running didn’t matter, nor did my job (consulting - lol). I needed to find what did matter to me, so that even if I didn’t stack up, I could still point to something and go - “yea, but that’s still objectively awesome”

For those reading this article and saying “this is me, now” I would encourage you to think less about competition and more about values. At the end of the day, competition is a means, not an end; a Surface-level proximal driver, not a core, distal cause.

The key question is: what do you care about right now? What good do you want to do?