I'm Better Than Me.

Today's Marketing Cookie is about keeping score.

When I saw today's fortune, I couldn't help but think of the song "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" by Ethel Merman and Ray Middleton from the 1946 Broadway musical, *Annie Get Your Gun*. During the song, they playfully argue about who can, for example, sing softer, higher, sweeter, and hold a note longer. While there have been many versions of the song, I think the duel between Ethel Merman and Miss Piggy from *The Muppet Show* "Showtune Medley" was the best rendition.

We have always been in a never-ending competition to be and do everything better than someone else. With the Guinness Book of World Records as our benchmark, we seek to find the best/worst, longest/shortest, highest/lowest, thinnest/fattest of everything. From hot dog eating contests, beauty contests, drinking contests, and ping pong contests, to the long jump, triple jump, and high jump, we want to celebrate the winner and will promptly forget every "also ran" that ever was. We are in a never-ending pursuit of winning at something... or at least not losing at everything, and keeping up with the Joneses is no exception.

Don't feel bad. The desire to win is as natural as our drive for survival. It's in our DNA. We want to win and we see contests being waged all around us. We watch our neighbors, coworkers, friends, and even our siblings, and we compare their lives with our own. We see the class above and the class below and we pass judgment on the ranking of our own position and possessions. While some are focused on getting more, there are others who have enrolled in a contest to own the fewest possessions, live the simplest, and consume the least. Whichever way a person may choose to run in their life-long contest, they are likely to judge others and themselves along the way.

While you may already be the winner of something, or perhaps even the winner of nothing, I would like to say that winning isn't everything. If for a moment, you can take your eyes off the prize and look beyond the contest, you'll see the many lessons you've learned in your personal journey. For every struggle you've overcome, you've grown stronger. For every hardship you've faced, you've become more determined. If you must keep score in the contest, I encourage you to measure how many of your failures have made you wiser, and how you've gained indisputable experience.

As today's fortune says, "You will read this and say 'Geez! I could come up with better fortunes than that!'"... but who's keeping score?