"I don't need to beat them. I need to beat the best version of them"

A competitor who aims to outpace not a rival’s average day but their peak performance adopts a ruthless standard. It rejects the easy win over someone’s off-day and instead builds preparation around the hardest possible scenario: a fully healthy, flawlessly executing opponent who makes no mistakes. That mindset eliminates complacency. You don’t program training for what usually happens; you program for what could happen at the absolute ceiling of the field.

This reframing shifts focus from outcomes to controllables. The task becomes: construct a model of your opponents at their best, fresh, precise, confident, and engineer your own capabilities to surpass that model. That demands deeper work: building technical proficiency that holds under fatigue, developing pacing that withstands surges, cultivating resilience for when the plan breaks, and creating enough capacity that even their perfect round leaves you with margin. It’s preemptive respect turned into preparation.

Psychologically, it reduces noise. You stop scanning the leaderboard for weaknesses and start auditing your own. If they stumble, great; if they don’t, you’re still ready. This discipline fosters consistency because the benchmark never shifts with the variability of a competition day. You are no longer hostage to luck, injuries, or an opponent’s mistakes. You measure against the highest bar, not the fluctuating average.

There’s humility in it, too. Assuming others can reach a higher level forces you to treat every detail, sleep, nutrition, mechanics, recovery, strategy, as consequential. It’s a guardrail against gaming the field and a call to build antifragility: the capacity to perform when everything is hard and nothing goes your way.

Beyond sport, the principle scales. Compete with the best version of the market, the audience, the problem. Design for peak demand, not typical. Speak to the most discerning critic, not the easiest crowd. When the standard is the opponent’s best, the byproduct is your own.