Better Than You

** Here are some of my notes for International Speech Contest at Toastmasters. This is not my speech, but rather an altered version to make it more suitable for reading. **

Being Australian born Chinese generally would mean that you would hear things like

“Its great you got 90 in your last exam, but Jackie got 95! Why can’t you be like Jackie?”

Luckily for me; those comparisons quickly disappeared especially between my younger brother and I. To understand why; when I was in my 3rd year of university; studying mathematics, my brother just started his first year. He was given permission from the Maths department to enroll in a level 3 pure Maths class, ignoring any 2nd year pre-requisites. He subsequently scored in the mid 90s for that course. Comparisons never really needed to be brought up within my family, because it from young age, it was clear that my younger brother, was, and will probably always be better than me.

Ladies and gentle, fellow toastmasters - we live in a society; we inevitably compare ourselves to others; where we size ourselves up, even from a young age, all you’ll have to do is to find two siblings and simply give a large bowl of sweets and you’ll hear cries of “well that’s not fair”.

That’s the thing about fairness; whenever someone talks about “fairness” they always talk about what is fair - for them (just like me).

The act of making a comparison; saying I’m better than you, intrinsically means that there is some kind of value to a person. I like to think of this value to be derived from a bowl; a bowl of our knowledge, abilities and most importantly our fortunes and misfortunes.

That’s what human nature really is; we go over to someone else’s bowl and take one aspect and create a judgement based on that! Don’t believe me? Imagine you’re at a party, and you ask someone ‘well what do you do?’ Like it or not, we subconsciously take this very small part of you and determine how valuable you are as a person. For example, we may treat someone who introduces themselves as a neurosurgeon very differently to say a taxi driver - and in that very instance, we have just derived someone’s value based on their knowledge and abilities.

What about luck and fortune? As individuals, when we achieve something, we often pat ourselves on the back and attribute to hard work; and when things go wrong, well bad luck - Yet on the flip side, there is a tendency to view other’s success as being good fortune and other’s failures due to their failure to reach their potential. As a society, we really should be more open to the notion that bad things happen to good people.

It maybe encouraging to think that life is based on the accrual of positive karma, which we collect and heave up for a rainy day. Instead we should all strive to examine other’s people’s accrual of fortune to be both good and bad.

So far I’ve talked about the two facets of how we compare people, knowledge and abilities and the role of luck. I’ve even touched on the fact that comparisons are inevitable - like it or not we will take a small piece of someone and create a value judgement based on that; it isn’t something we can simply actively ignore.

What should we do? Some people they say, well maybe there are some things that you’re better than your brother at! Maybe if you nit-pick on something really specific, but in general anyone who knows the two of us would tell you; my brother is a better athletes and musician than me; and I have had peers who received academic awards and moved on to compete in sport of their choice at a national level, it is truly terrifying to meet people who are that much better than you in every conceivable way.

It’s important to remind ourselves, when we make comparisons we always compare from our perspective; our viewpoint; very rarely would we try to perceive the world from someone else who isn’t as knowledgeable or as lucky as ourselves.

Really, the solution to all this is rather simple - we should always compare ourselves with our brother or sister, or the person next to you, and look at their bowl - with all their abilities, and fortune; to see whether they have enough. Not to see if we have as much or whether we’re better than them, but to see if they have enough.

Madam Toastmaster.