Keeping Up with the ConGen: When There’s Only Room for One On Top

By Consul General Paul Raymund Cortes

When I was a child, everything was just about who got to be the Top. In school, it was the race towards being the Best Student, Rank #1, the Best in Spelling, the Best in Music, Best in Conduct, Best Speaker, Best in Math, and so on. At work, it was about who got promoted first or who got There the fastest. Even among family and friends, and even in the neighborhood, it was about who was the most successful, who had a best career, who had the biggest home, the fanciest car, or even the most fashionable wear and couture. We were programmed in Darwinian fashion, believing that only the best survive and only the one on Top merited the respect and admiration of peers and superiors. In retrospect, we were groomed to accept that life was, simply put, the race to that steeple summit, so that all that mattered was if and when one gets to clobber his/her opponents and blow them to smithereens until he/she gets to be acknowledged as the top of the food chain. 

Years pass and we get older, sometimes wiser. The epiphany that competition isn’t really all that makes sense in this world slowly rises to our perspectives. We soon understand the folly of jostling each other whatever the cost, whatever the consequence. Social media regales us with tales of success stories of those who beat the odds or those who ran their own sprints. There must be some way, we now contend, that sooner or later these “losers” would eventually win their personal races or the races only they would find themselves running in. Somehow, we eventually understand as not everyone could win at any given moment, those who do not get the prize cannot be all that bad – or failures – or simply unworthy of emulation!

We’ve heard it time and again – in a world where everyone searches for excellence, mediocrity certainly must never be considered or even thought of at all. True enough, we owe it to be better editions of ourselves at all times. And it must be stressed that our path to excellence must be answerable to us alone and no one else. This means that we have to keep improving in whatever field we choose to be in, the norm for improvement being not in comparison to someone else but against lesser versions of ourselves. Being the best surely feeds the hungry ego but excellence should not be construed as being on top of the heap, nestled at a vantage point, looking down upon the rest of the pack. Difficult as it is to unlearn all that we were trained to believe, being excellent is not a predicate of being the best of a lot or even better compared to another.

When the realization — that life is a never ending cycle and that there will always be someone better, taller, prettier, smarter, more talented, and a notch above whatever it is we have achieved to serve as benchmarks for others — hits us, we realign our track in the search for the essence of excellence. Some years back when I began competing with myself instead and ceased the comparisons I have made between myself and others, perceptions of what it truly meant to be excellent had become more crystal clear. I had come to accept that there was no point in attempting to make the whole world (well, at least my community) know that I was better than someone and that I wouldn’t have settled for anything else than the apex. I had become less critical of others, shifting my opinions of them in a way that made me imagine and understand the personal races they were running and battling. Maybe their paths to their excellence took a wrong turn or maybe their races hit a snag. Maybe the paths they chose were filled with deep potholes as opposed to our smooth sailing one. Maybe theirs were more challenging routes compared to the others’ walk in the park. Maybe the Will for them was to lose and learn something else in the process as opposed to our victorious streaks.

At some point in life, we finally understand that life as a purported rat race just seems meaningless because winning a race when running against someone does not necessarily mean a gain for the winner and a loss for another. What does one gain in the greater scheme of things when one wins a race against someone else only to be eclipsed by the loss of another? Excellence cannot simply be defined as a by-product of a race, it is the far greater than the sum of all its parts.

You’ve seen the video on FB – two brothers running at a triathlon race in Mexico. The younger one, Jonny, suddenly collapses just as he was about to cross the finish line. His brother, Alistair, not far behind, with the chance to overtake him and win the race himself, stops, picks his brother up, and helps him finish the race, arm over his shoulder, hobbling, watching another finish the race first, then pushing his brother towards the line to finish even ahead of him………. that just about sums it up!

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CONSUL GENERAL PAUL RAYMUND CORTES

When not performing his duties as the head of the Filipino community in Dubai and the Northern Emirates, or the obligations of a dutiful dad, passionate patriot Paul Raymund Cortes mulls over how to further enrich the local Filipino community by promoting a more progressive mindset.

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