Healthy Competition

Competition typically breeds greatness.

Brian Wilson was so blown away by Rubber Soul that he immediately started work on Pet Sounds.

Everyone needs a direct adversary to humble you, a rival to push you beyond your limits, a muse to inspire oneself to brilliance.

So my personal Rubber Soul -- or Pet Sounds, whichever. We can figure out exactly who's who later -- is my friend Angelica's blog Culturally Subverting Bedtime Stories. It's a fantastic blog, one of the few that I follow on a regular basis. And there's nothing mean-spirited about this...I consider it a very healthy, cordial competition. But I can't deny that I track her progress with personal interest, out of the corner of my eye, making sure she hasn't yet surpassed me; and if she has, hopefully I haven't fallen too far behind. I feel absolutely compelled to write with each new blog entry she posts and each new blog entry I don't post.

She writes more than me now. Her most recent work is from the 10th, just a couple of days ago. My most recent work is from the 28th...of September. I'm lagging. Without habitual updates, the blog as a medium is rendered ineffective.

Her blog title is more clever than mine. There's a charming ambiguity and duality to its meaning: the bedtime stories she tells are subversive to the conventions of the culture that we live in; or maybe it's the other way around, she's subverting the bedtime stories themselves, completely undermining everything we thought we knew about "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." My blog title isn't quite as inclusive, as I don't think "Objectivism" means much to those who aren't familiar with the work of Ayn Rand.


Her blog includes a nice balance between text and multimedia. On my front page, I only have two YouTube vidoes up, while she has about seven times that. Hers is just more visually stimulating. I should take better advantage of people's inherent fondness for moving pictures.

We have a lot in common with a lot of intersecting interests. We typically aim for the same online demographic. This just gives me added incentive to keep writing because it's only a matter of time before she writes something that I would have, or that I would want to.

So read her blog. And then read mine. I might even have something new posted.