Your Personal Best

It's easy to become intimidated by good writing--to open a book and see how fluid, how clever, how brilliant someone else is being. It's easy to compare yourself to another author and feel like you've come up short.

But I found this quote today, and it's a wonderful reminder. The only one we should be striving to out-do is....ourselves. Our own personal best is all we can ever hope to achieve, as writers. In fact, it's futile and sometimes harmful to wish we could be "the next" whoever. Instead, we should strive to reach and maintain our own personal best. Not that it's easy, of course....

“I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.” ~Michail Nikolaevič Baryšnikov