Being the best that I can be

I have a lot of favorite writers.  They're all better than me.  Now that we've established that, I'm still gonna do the damn thing.

For a long time, I had a hang up about that.  Basically, I'd compare myself to those who inspire me and found myself lacking.  Actually, who am I kidding?  I still do it.  I'm not gonna pretend that this sudden creative output on my end means that I'm magically healed.  The questions are still in the back of my mind.  For all I know, they'll be there forever.  When I do this, I'm not as funny as Seanbaby or Drew Magary.  I'm not as prolific as Bill Simmons or as profound as Ralph Wiley.  When I write stories, I'm not as inventive as Geoff Johns or Fred Van Lente. 

But that doesn't mean I should stop, either.  I can still bring something to the table. 

You'll never be satisfied if you're constantly comparing yourself to others.  You're on your own path, trying to make your own way and find your own voice.  Just because you feel that someone is better doesn't mean there's no place for you.  If that were the case, the only players who would have even tried to go to the NBA after Michael Jordan would have been Kobe and Lebron.  There's a whole league of other stars who are also great without being the greatest of all time. 

And who knows, you might one day become just as good or better than those you admire.  But you won't know until you try.

When I was growing up, I wanted to draw like Jim Lee.  Jim Lee is the best artist in the world, ever, as far as I'm concerned.  He's the one who defined the look of the X-Men for my generation.  Whenever I would draw the X-Men, they were based on his interpretations.  I'd try to use his techniques and poses and anything to try to get closer to his level.  Over the years, I got a little better, but never anything close to what he could do.  And that frustrated me.  By the time I reached college, my childhood dream of drawing comic books was dead.  By the time I reached my 30s, I had given up drawing altogether.  I had reached my limits, and drawing was no longer fun or relaxing.  It had become a constant struggle to get my ideas from my head onto the paper.

Then, one day, my girlfriend was looking through one of my old sketchbooks, and to her, I was amazing.  She told me that I should have never given up drawing to begin with and that, if I hadn't stopped, who knows what could have happened.

And that's the point:  Who knows?  No, I was never going to be Jim Lee, but that doesn't mean what I could do was worthless.  I'm probably not going to take up drawing again, besides the occasional doodling, but those lessons I can put towards the writing that I do now.

I have something to say.  It might have a lot of cusswords in it sometimes, but there's a message and point of view in there that is uniquely mine.  It can't be found anywhere else but right here.  And with some work, maybe that voice will be appreciated by others.  And I think that's true of anything.  

So if you have a dream and you're worried about how it stacks up to someone else's output, stop doing that to yourself.  You're just killing your own progress, because you're trying to be them instead of being the best you that you can be.  While you're knocking your own moves, because of a person who doesn't even know you're there, you're not appreciating exactly how good those moves are in their own right.