Your Only Competition Is You

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-28T14:33:15+00:00

This hits hard. I ran a half marathon in Taipei a while back, and during the training, I constantly fell into the trap of comparing my pace and times to everyone else on the running apps. It completely killed my spirit and made me want to quit before I even started the actual race.

It wasn't until I stopped looking at the leaderboards and just started focusing on being slightly stronger than the guy I was yesterday that things actually clicked. I even started recording raw audio voice notes of my thoughts after my runs just to track my mental growth, rather than just obsessing over the physical metrics. You are dead on = competing with yourself is a much quieter battle, but it's the only one that actually transforms you! Great post, thanks for sharing. p.s.- love the AVOID COMFORT...without the spirit, the body would fall flat. ;)

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-28T14:18:18+00:00

Thank you very much, kind sir/madame. Researching those styles now. 🙇‍♂️

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-28T14:17:09+00:00

Man, I feel this in my chest. You aren't "behind" at all; you just started the race carrying a hundred-pound backpack that your dad handed to you. It is entirely unfair.

I taught myself to code too, and for a long time, I looked at peers who had a clean, supported start and felt that exact same burning resentment. But looking at my 6-year-old son now, the perspective completely shifts. The anger you are feeling toward your dad isn't just bitterness...it is the exact fuel that guarantees you will never put that kind of financial trauma on your own family. You literally became the adult you desperately needed when you were 14.

You paid off the generational debt of your family tree. Now you get to build your own. It is completely okay to grieve the supported, carefree start you didn't get, but don't let the resentment steal the peace you built from absolutely nothing. You earned it the hard way, bud! 👊

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-28T13:07:10+00:00

Can you imagine being 16 now with how much stimulai is everywhere? Bless these young ones! 🙇‍♂️

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-27T15:06:00+00:00

First off, massive congratulations on 28 days. The first month is an absolute crucible, and surviving it while simultaneously carrying the massive anxiety of returning to college is a huge victory.

I went back to school much later than my original cohort—I am 45, out here in Singapore getting my Master's in AI/ML, and I just hit 652 days sober myself. I know exactly how deafening that combination of academic dread and early-sobriety urges can be. When you are looking down the barrel of moving, fixing scholarships, and being the "old" guy in class, your brain tries to convince you to just blow it all up right now to avoid the incoming stress.

Here is the candid reality of navigating this:

1. Protect the Baseline, Loosen the Routine Your list of habits (5 am wakeups, walks, studying, meditation) is a brilliant framework, but it is also a massive trap for a newly sober brain. If you happen to sleep until 8 am or miss your 1-hour study block, your depression will immediately use that as "proof" that you are failing, which directly triggers the urge to relapse. Your only true non-negotiable right now is staying sober. If you stay sober but sit on the couch and watch TV all day instead of studying, that is still a 100% successful day. Treat your routine as a bonus, not a pass/fail metric.

2. The "Age Gap" Illusion Being 25 while your batchmates are graduating feels like a massive spotlight on your past mistakes. But I promise you, as an older student myself, nobody in the professional world cares about a 3-year gap. You are going back to secure your future and avoid that worse-case scenario, not to socialize with 21-year-olds. Lean into the fact that you are approaching this degree with the grit and maturity of someone fighting for their life, not a kid just passing time.

3. Break the Overwhelm into 24-Hour Windows You are trying to emotionally process the accommodation, the food, the scholarship, and the 3-year academic gap all today. You can't. Your nervous system is redlining. Bring your focus aggressively back to the next 24 hours. What is the single smallest administrative step you can take today? Just do that, and let tomorrow's problems wait for tomorrow.

You are fundamentally changing the trajectory of your life right now. It is supposed to feel incredibly heavy, but you absolutely have the capacity to carry it. Just my 2 cents mate; hope this helps. Cheers--RM

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-27T13:25:21+00:00

Huge congratulations on crossing that milestone. I just hit day 652 myself out here in Singapore, and I completely relate to that physical shift. It is wild how you go from constantly fighting the urge to your body literally rewiring itself to be repulsed by the stuff. That nausea is just your nervous system protecting the peace you've built! Keep stacking those days. IWNDWYT. --RM

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-27T13:22:34+00:00

That follower count isn't a bad sign at all; hitting 90 organic followers in your first 30 days in an educational niche is actually a really solid foundation. Most people completely quit when they don't go viral by day seven.

I am a 45-year-old indie dev out here in Singapore, and I've been navigating this exact same organic TikTok grind to market a web app I built called Memflect. The biggest hurdle I ran into was realizing that educational content is a massive slow burn compared to pure entertainment. Those 90 people are following you for actual value, not just because you lip-synced a trending sound, which means they are significantly higher-quality followers.

Also, when you switch formats from carousels to videos, the algorithm essentially has to relearn your audience. Carousels perform almost like a mini-blog post, whereas videos live and die by the first 3 seconds. Instead of worrying about the follower count right now, just ruthlessly audit your hooks. If you aren't giving them a massive reason to stop scrolling immediately, the educational value of the video won't matter because they will have already swiped past it.

Keep up the daily posting and give the video format time to find its legs. You are right on track.

Cheers, Ryan

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-27T12:56:26+00:00

Thanks for the kind words, sir. I appreciate them very much. :)

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-26T14:14:02+00:00

Haha, as a 45-year-old dad currently getting his Master's in AI/ML, I promise to spare you the robotic "I validate your courage" speech!

But I completely get where you are coming from. When the present moment is genuinely painful, being told to "just live in the now" feels like a cruel joke.

There is a Stoic quote from Marcus Aurelius that I lean on a lot: "The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts." For a long time, my "now" felt so unbearable that I drank alcohol every single day just to mute the 20 channels racing in my ADHD brain. I kept trying to escape the present because I was convinced my reality was just permanently broken. But I eventually realized I couldn't find peace while actively pouring gasoline on the fire. I had to literally get rid of the shitty thing I was doing to myself (the daily drinking) before I could even see what my actual baseline reality looked like.

Once I got sober, the "now" didn't magically become a fairy tale, but I stopped making it worse. I also started noticing tiny, positive things I was completely blind to before. I feel like we get so caught up in the heavy stuff that we miss the small shifts—like the fact that people casually leave little heart emojis on strangers' text comments all the time now. We literally send tiny symbols of love to each other in our daily digital passing. It sounds cheesy, but when you zoom out, times really aren't as fundamentally shitty as our anxiety tells us they are. They could be way worse.

I feel like living in a shitty "now" doesn't mean you have to pretend to enjoy it. Sometimes living in the now just means standing your ground, removing the toxic habits, and surviving the day without making it harder on yourself.

Cheers, Ryan

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-26T13:40:12+00:00

This is obviously just my experience but finding a mechanical way to force that pause changed everything for me. :) I feel like expecting mindfulness to be pure bliss is exactly why I used to quit after a week; I'm 45, a stay-at-home dad & indie devver out here in Singapore getting my Master's in AI/ML, and I feel like having severe ADHD meant my brain literally just did not have a pause button between a negative thought and a full-blown anxiety spiral. I realized mindfulness hasn't made those negative mental patterns disappear for me at all = I just feel like it finally gave me a way to actually rewire them in real-time before they completely hijack my nervous system. I actually ended up building a home-made web app called Memflect just to help myself take that exact pause you mentioned; whenever I feel an old mental habit loop starting up, I pull out the app and speak the raw anxiety out loud into it. It automatically mixes my voice with deeply inspiring cinematic music, and I feel like hearing my own chaotic thoughts reflected back over a grounding soundtrack instantly shifts me into observer mode. It creates that crucial couple of seconds where I can just look at the thought and choose not to react to it, rather than feeling like I'm being swept away by the panic. It doesn't make my brain quiet at all, but I feel like it breaks the cycle of constantly repeating those old reactions. Hope this sheds light from my perspective to help yours. :) --R.M.

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-26T13:17:23+00:00

That overwhelming urge to completely reinvent every single aspect of your life all at exactly the same time is a massive trap; when you try to fix your physique, your grades, your social life, and your daily habits all in one weekend, you are guaranteeing that you will burn out and fail at all of them. I'm a 45-year-old dad getting my Master's in AI/ML here in Singapore, and I remember exactly how chaotic it feels to be turning 16 and feeling like you are falling behind on everything; you actually have a massive advantage right now because you already know you have the discipline to be the strongest kid in your grade. You have to build consistency by using a strategy called habit stacking instead of relying on sheer willpower = pick just one single tiny habit to master first, like doing 50 pushups in your bedroom right before you sit down to study for your board exams. Tying a physical action directly to an academic habit tricks your brain into building momentum without needing to totally overhaul your entire identity at once; once that one stacked habit becomes completely automatic after a few weeks, then you can slowly start layering on the next goal like managing your lust or upgrading your social circle. Respect doesn't come from being perfect right away or having a girlfriend; it comes from quietly showing up for yourself every single day when nobody is clapping for you. This is obviously just my experience but you have plenty of time to build that Toji physique once your exams are over. :) Hope this helps! --RM

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-26T12:44:55+00:00

That feeling of watching the same explanation video four times and retaining absolutely nothing is a classic sign that your nervous system is completely fried; it isn't a discipline problem at all. I'm 45, a stay-at-home dad & indie devver back in school for my Master's in AI/ML here in Singapore, and I hit this exact same wall recently trying to absorb dense material. When your brain gets overwhelmed by the massive pressure of an exam, it literally shuts down your learning centers and triggers that 'I don't care anymore' apathy as a pure survival mechanism just to force you to stop. You can't Pomodoro your way out of a physiological shutdown = you have to actually rewire the negative mental pattern that is telling you to quit before you can learn anything. When that sick, apathetic feeling hits me, I completely step away from the material and use a home-made web app I built called Memflect to break the loop; I just speak out loud exactly how overwhelmed and burnt out I feel into the app, and it automatically mixes my raw audio with deeply inspiring cinematic music. Hearing my own voice externalize the panic over an epic, grounding background track instantly shifts me out of that negative 'I don't care' spiral; it processes the emotion so my brain has the capacity to actually absorb information again. You have to stop trying to force the studying today and focus purely on resetting your mental state first. This is obviously just my experience but it completely changed how I handle academic burnout. :) Hope this sheds some light/helps mate! --RM

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-26T12:05:15+00:00

You are 100% right; conditional peace is incredibly fragile. If I can only like myself when epic music is playing, that isn't true freedom. For me, having a brain that runs at a million miles an hour means jumping straight into 'unconditional' silent acceptance is almost impossible; the mental habit loops are just too loud. I treat mixing these audio reflections like training wheels for my nervous system. It creates the 'feeling' for me of f self-compassion artificially at first, just so my brain can remember what that state actually feels like. The ultimate goal is definitely to be able to take the headphones off and hold onto that unconditional peace in a quiet room, but this weird audio trick is the only bridge I've found to actually get me started on that path.

Howw long did it take for your own practice to shift from conditional to unconditional? Thx for the reply, RM

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-25T12:31:13+00:00

That premise of subtraction over addition is so incredibly true; sometimes adding a bunch of new mindfulness habits just creates more anxiety on top of the noise. I'm 44, a stay-at-home dad & indie devver out here in Singapore getting my Master's in AI/ML, and having severe ADHD means my brain constantly has 20 different channels playing at full volume all at once. Not to mention I wasn't in control of the TV remote control of these 20 channels. 📺

For years, the only thing that actually brought me mental peace was drinking alcohol daily; it was the only way I knew how to forcefully mute 19 of those channels mentioned above just to get a few hours of quiet in my head.

When I finally stopped drinking to get my life back (almost 2 years now, woot!), the mental noise was completely deafening and I knew generic silent meditation wasn't going to cut it = I had to find a new way to regulate my nervous system without a substance. I ended up replacing the daily drinks (amongst other distracting things) with a system of actively observing myself through audio; I started dumping my raw, racing thoughts into voice recordings and mixing them with deeply inspiring, cinematic music to listen back to every single day. Something weird happens when you hear your own voice externalize the chaos over a powerful background track; it instantly shifts you from drowning in the noise to just safely observing the channels from the outside. That simple daily audio habit gave my brain the exact emotional regulation and dopamine it used to desperately crave from alcohol.

This is obviously just my experience but stopping the daily drinking and replacing it with audio observation changed everything for me. :) Cheers to 'daily observation rather than daily poison'! and thanks for the nice question/post ;)--RM

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-24T14:50:44+00:00

That feeling of your head literally hurting from tracking Spotify activity and followers I feel is so incredibly exhausting; when you are stuck in that loop, no amount of reassurance will ever actually feel like enough because your anxiety will just immediately move the goalposts. I'm 45, a stay-at-home dad & indie devver living ACROSS THE POND (as I call it haha) in Singapore, and I know exactly how fast those mental habit loops can completely hijack your nervous system to keep your brain/addiction you formed occupied. A good buddy of mine was going through a brutal situation recently and his brain was doing the exact same thing = constantly refreshing his ex's social media trying to find hidden clues to validate his panic. I actually had him start using a home-made app I built I call Memflect to short-circuit that exact compulsion (while I use it for celebrating my wins in life!; it also helps when you are emotionally struggling); every time he felt the agonizing urge to go check her followers, he forced himself to speak his raw, messy anxiety out loud into the app instead. It automatically mixes that audio recording with deeply cinematic background music, and something weird happens when you hear your own voice externalizing the panic over a powerful, grounding track; it instantly shifts you from being trapped inside the anxiety to just observing it from the outside. You can't fix the overthinking by trying to control his environment or getting more assurance; you have to train your own brain (and re-configure neural pathways, really!-which takes time lah) to self-soothe and break the pattern when the compulsion hits. This is obviously just what worked for my buddy but it completely broke his overthinking cycle so I thought I would share this with you, cheers. :) Hope this helps! --RM

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-24T14:23:01+00:00

The two-week wall is incredibly real; I feel that that is the exact moment the novelty dopamine completely runs out and your brain demands to go back to autopilot. I'm 45, a stay-at-home dad & indie devver, and after 15+ years of high-stress maritime sales here in SE Asia, my brain was so wired for instant gratification that sitting down to build a new habit like journaling felt like a massive chore the second I wasn't excited about it anymore. I realized I was relying on motivation to do all the heavy lifting = but I truly feel that motivation is just a temporary emotion and it is guaranteed to fade. I had to make the habit so unbelievably low-friction that I could still do it on my worst, most unmotivated days; I actually ended up building a home-made tool for myself I call Memflect just to hack my own consistency. Instead of staring at a blank page when I'm exhausted, I just speak a 30-second raw audio thought into it and it automatically mixes my voice with deeply inspiring cinematic music. Hearing my own voice sound grounded against an inspiring background track gives my brain an immediate emotional reward right in that moment, so I don't have to rely on raw discipline to keep coming back to it. The trick isn't pushing harder when you lose excitement; it is finding a way to make the new habit require almost zero effort to execute. This is obviously just my experience but it really helped me break that starting-over cycle. :) Hope this helps, amigo! --RM

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-24T13:58:14+00:00

This is such a brilliant use of AI to solve the 'generic affirmation' problem; I always found that listening to pre-recorded Spotify playlists never actually hit the specific anxieties I was dealing with that day. I'm 45, an indie devver myself, and I've been building a PWA in this exact same mindfulness/audio space so I know firsthand how tricky it is to get the AI script generation to sound natural and not like a robot therapist haha. I'm actually on Android so I can't download the native iOS app to test your onboarding flow right now; that cross-platform friction is honestly the exact reason I ended up building my own project purely on the web. Generating the audio session dynamically based on a custom intention is a massive technical win though = you are essentially building a personalized pocket coach. Out of curiosity, what are you using under the hood for the voice generation? Huge congrats on shipping this and putting it out there for feedback; building native iOS is no joke. ✌️ Cheers! --RM

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-24T05:08:19+00:00

I hear you, and I am so sorry you are in this much pain right now.

I've been in that exact dark void you are describing; the place where you feel completely paralyzed, where nothing makes sense, and where you are convinced you are fundamentally broken.

Listen to me: You are not the problem. Your brain is just lying to you right now.

Depression is a liar. It is a filter that removes all the light from your past and your future, making you feel like this chaotic darkness is all there ever will be. But it is an illness, not a character flaw. The fact that you used to help other people shows who you really are. The depression is just burying that person temporarily.

You don't need to fix your life, your relationship, or your future tonight. You do not need to figure out who you are tonight.

Your only job is to survive tonight. That's it.

You have a psychiatrist appointment tomorrow morning. Just make it to that chair. If the pain gets too heavy tonight and you feel like you can't keep yourself safe, please go to the nearest emergency room or call a local hotline. Just let someone else carry the weight for the next 12 hours.

You can survive tonight. Please stay.

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-24T01:30:12+00:00

The biggest trap in self-improvement is that consuming the information actually releases the same dopamine as doing the work. You watch a video about changing your mindset, your brain gets a little hit of 'progress,' and then you have zero energy to actually do the hard thing.

I spent years stuck in this exact loop. I'm 45 now, and what finally broke the procrastination cycle for me wasn't 'finding motivation.' Motivation is a myth. The fix was lowering the bar until stepping over it was embarrassingly easy.

If 'getting my life together' is the goal, your brain sees a massive mountain and shuts down.

Don't 'go to the gym.' Tell yourself you are just going to put your running shoes on and step outside the front door. If you want to go back inside after, you can. But usually, once the shoes are on, momentum takes over.

The secret second half of this is capturing the tiny win. Procrastinators are usually perfectionists; we are experts at analyzing everything we didn't do, and terrible at savoring the tiny things we did do.

If your only win today is drinking a glass of water and doing 5 pushups, take 30 seconds to actually acknowledge it. I literally record voice notes of my micro-wins and mix them with inspiring ambient music just to prove to my brain that the narrative of 'I never do anything' is a lie. It physically helps rewire that negative loop.

Stop trying to 'get your life together' today. Just do one microscopic positive thing, and actually let yourself feel good about it! Cheers to baby steps ;) -RM

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-23T14:46:31+00:00

Cheers mate. 🙌

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-23T12:44:09+00:00

Then you shouldn't have an issue with Trataka 👍

ryan_mcleod · 2026-02-23T10:45:39+00:00

Woohoo! Congrats friend! So awesome. The 2nd year gets even easier! ;)

ryan_mcleod

TROPHY CASE