Become Better Than Yesterday, Not Better Than Others

1/15/2026

By Olivia L, Grade 11

Before attending Stanstead College, I did not participate in many team sports. My whole life, I skied during the winter and sailed during the summer. During those years, I did make my school soccer team and played for one season, and then a couple of years later I played flag football for two consecutive seasons.

Coming to Stanstead with the student-athlete program, I had to choose a sport for each term, and I told myself, why not try out for sports I have never played before? And so I did, I tried out for soccer, volleyball, rugby, and basketball with absolutely no knowledge of how to play. With practice, I became more confident, but I still had this tendency to compare my skills to the other girls on my team. I couldn’t understand how it looked so easy for them to take a free kick, do an overhand serve, a drop kick, or even just a layup.

The problem was that I was comparing myself to girls who had way more years of experience than me. Some of them had been playing these sports for up to eight years, and there was no way I could compare skills I had learned in a couple of months to skills developed over eight years.

This made me think of a quote, that I heard a couple months ago from one of our family friends that really stuck with me: “You can’t compare your first chapter to someone else’s twentieth chapter.” This made me realize that there is no use in comparing myself to other people around me, whether it is in sports, academics, or even in daily life. It’s like comparing an apple to a pear. You’re comparing yourself to someone with a different mentality and different fears, strengths, experiences, accomplishments, and failures.

What I learned from this is that we can’t compare ourselves to others and hope to become as good or better than them. It won’t get us anywhere. But what we can do is compare ourselves to the person we were yesterday, a month ago, or even a year ago. That’s how we can acknowledge our progress and continue working to become a better version of ourselves for tomorrow.

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