Our Family, Our Strength - Principle #12: Competing with Oneself - Rabbi Yirmiyahu Abramov

okay we continue with our series of twenty five basic principles of Jewish child rearing this is brought in the book our family our strength and I'm giving the synopsis of these 25 principles so principle number 12 when I was a kid one of the most talked about topics and subjects throughout the world was whether the human being can run a mile in less than four minutes it was the whole thing is it possible for the human being for the human athlete now's the times of the Olympic Games everyone's everyone's they involved with us is it Kate is the human being capable of running a mile in four in less than four minutes and great scholars came into the scene there were physiologic we are physiologists and professors who said that the human being is incapable of running a mile in four minutes because his heart lung facilities will not allow such as such a sustained pace for the human being and so it was and there was much discussion about this and there was a young man a British athlete by the name of Roger Bannister and Roger Bannister decided he's going to break the four-minute barrier how do you do it so he tried many times and he just couldn't get there and those experts said well you see it's the human even athlete of his caliber is incapable of running a mile in four minutes until one day Roger Bannister came upon a great a great formula he took four athletes and he asked each one of them to compete with him for one lap a lap is 440 yards and all together makes up a mile for these laps makes up a mile so you asked each athlete to compete with him for one lap none of them could sustain a heavy pace for more than one lap against this great Roger Bannister and so he ran against the first one and the first one gave it everything you had and banister kept up with him and then came on a new a new fresh athlete and he ran again and banister kept up with him also he was pushed on by the competition and so the third and so the fourth and he smashed the foreman at barrier and since then men have continued running faster running more the principle is competition the human being is motivated by competition competition can bring out the tremendous potential within the individual a person doesn't even know how great and how cow capably is until he comes up with competition competition is something that the rabbi's of the Talmud us to talk about that competition usually in it in a positive context can be extremely useful for achieving now there's a great problem many people misuse this concept of competition you can have a situation when you've got kids in a classroom some of them are very bright some of them have got fantastic memory capacity some of them can understand things of great depth some of them are capable like chess players of holding in their minds a whole array of different factors and juggling them around everybody is given different mental capabilities different levels of intelligence and mental and intellectual capabilities now to compete one against the other just won't be fair if you've got this very bright smart kid who everything he immediately gets it he understands it straight away and you put him against another kid who's a regular normal kind of kid so the teacher poses the question so the bright young man jumps up straight away he's grabbed that he's got it and the other fella is still lagging behind is still trying to work it out those are his mental capacities now it's totally unfair to put the one against the other you can't they can't compete it's not right it's going to be a complete the destroying experience for the kid who doesn't have that level of mental capacity and so it is with everything we can't put kids against each other we can't compete with our fellow man because every man is endowed with a spectrum of his own energies and his own built-in abilities and their forts wrong it's wrong to put one against the other so where then if competition as we said is such a fantastic vehicle for bringing out potential where then can we use competition and the answer is given competition is indeed very healthy and it can bring out the best in a person but instead of encouraging the child code to compete with others which may not be a fair competition encourage him to compete with himself we must compete with ourselves we must compete with our latent potential and therefore a person can push himself by saying I know I'm capable of more I know I've got it within me to do even more and more compete within ourselves and that will be a fantastic motivating factor it's the parents responsibility to help the child pinpoint his own strengths and weaknesses and encourage the child to maximize his own potential but that's what's required maximize our own potential we should help him become who he really is we use only a fraction of our energies and our strengths and therefore the best ways instead of encouraging a child to compete with others encouraging to compete with himself and his own potential and this way he'll find and discover extraordinary levels of achievement and potential as he's competing with himself you