Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday

Rule 4 is compare yourself to who you were yesterday not to someone else is today. You need to have a hierarchy of improvement, you need to be aiming for something and that means you going to be lesser than people who've already attained along that dimension and that can give rise to Envy. So the question is who should you defeat in the final analysis, and the answer is you should defeat your former self. You should be constantly trying to do that and you're the right control for yourself too, because you're the one who's had all your advantages and disadvantages, and so if you want to compete fairly with someone then you should be competing with you. 

And it is the case, this is what we were talking about with regards to the self-improvement of the fighter is, well, if you're improving yourself than what you are doing is competing with your lesser self and then you might also ask, well what is that lesser self? And that lesser self would be resentful and bitter and aggressive and vengeance-seeking, and all of those things that go along with having a negative moral character. And those are things that interfere with your ability to progress as you move forward through life, so it's very necessary to understand that. 

This is why I've been stressing this idea of personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is to compete with yourself, is to be slightly better than yourself the next day, and then better in some way that you can actually manage and that's humility. Well, I'm a flawed person, I've got all my problems, could I be as good as person X? It's not the right question. The right question is, could you be slightly better tomorrow then you're currently flawed self, and the answer to that is - if you have enough humility to set the bar properly low then you could be better tomorrow than you are today. Because what you also have to do is, you have to say, well here's all my flaws and my insufficiencies and the best that someone that flawed and insufficient could do to improve and actually do it, is this. And that's not worth going out in the street and celebrating with placards. 

You know it's why I tell people to clean the room, it's not going to brag to someone that you did that, but that someone is insufficient as you might be able to manage it and that means you actually are on the pathway to self improvement, and you're transcending your former self. You might say, well, what's the right way of being in the world if there is such a thing. And it's not acting according to a set of rules,  it's attempting continually to transcend the flawed thing that you currently are. And what's so interesting about that is that the meaning in life is to be found in that Pursuit.