3rd Place Keeps the Ego out of the Story, which makes it Better
In a culture obsessed with perfection, the idea of “being the best” is drilled into us from childhood. Whether it’s in school, sports, or careers, the implicit message is: perfection equals success, and anything less is failure. But this relentless pursuit often creates a hidden trap , one that can leave you paralyzed with fear of making mistakes, stuck in a cycle of anxiety and self-doubt.
The Perils of Perfectionism | Perfectionism isn’t just about high standards, it’s about an inflexible demand for flawlessness. This can lead to procrastination, burnout, and a refusal to take risks. When perfection is the goal, mistakes become enemies rather than opportunities. The fear of “messing up” can stop you from trying new things, from learning, and ultimately from growing. Psychologists have found that perfectionism correlates strongly with anxiety and depression. When your identity is tied to being “perfect,” every error feels like a personal failure, a reflection of your worth.
Why is Aiming for Third Place Winning? What if instead of chasing perfection, you aimed for third place? Third place means accepting that you won’t always be first. You won’t always have the flawless performance, the perfect project, or the ideal outcome. And that’s not just okay — it’s powerful.
Aiming for third place encourages:
Growth over ego: You focus on improving, not on proving you’re the best.
Courage to experiment: You allow yourself to try, fail, and try again without fear.
Resilience: You develop grit because you learn to handle setbacks as natural parts of success.
Creative freedom: You’re less bound by rigid standards and more open to innovation.
Learning from, from a physics pod, is the currency of progress. Mistakes are not the opposite of success. They are data-gathering hunts!
Every breakthrough, every innovation, every personal achievement is built on trial, error, and adaptation. With a perfection, one risks missing the lessons hidden inside the learning process (which is often processed as failure because of the fear of being destitute is very real, as I can attest to through my experience with LAUSD schools who systemically fabricated evidence against me in their monolithic bureaucracy of no accountability). That Goliath must be taken down, for it has the pushed the souls out of our children and we are going to get their souls back!
This third place mindset allows you to celebrate incremental wins, seek feedback honestly, and cultivate the humility necessary to be a supreme student of God’s world, as I have tried to be most of my conscious life. My tennis partner in high school who was two years older said, “You were always asking questions about everything man. It’s like you didn’t necessarily care about what was going on, but you were interested in things nobody even really paid attention to.” That’s what he said when I asked him, “What was I like back then?”
And that’s the crazy thing about living — unless you write it down, it just streams through, and you can’t even trick the memory unless you write about it to bring you back to the reality that occurred — that’s why I began journaling when LAUSD came after me — I finally had time to reflect as my experience as a character on a timeline in God’s story — a practiced I had picked up from USC school of humanities — where it was required to study English and American literary theory, if you wanted to major in creative writing. As my story would have it I won third place in the fiction writing contest called “Moses”. I’ve been really curious about why its called “Moses” ; because I don’t know, it feels Biblical — this is where we will test if your writing can part the sea — you are “Moses” - a 3rd Place Moses — when I won the contest, I was so delighted because I wasn’t sure my story made any sense — I had been reading Equus in one of my other classes, and it was all about horses — and back then horses really didn’t interest me, so I thought it would be interesting to write a story about how a guy was connected to a car instead of a horse — and the way I was able to do it was inspired by that movie “Ghost” — so I combined the idea to create this story about this racetrack around this house where there was this kid whose grandfather died who was the inventor of a hybrid car, like a Ferrari, and when the car reaches a certain speed, his grandfather’s voice can be heard, and in his mind his grandfather is next to him again, and this only happens when he goes over a certain speed, and that’s how he talks to a guy he had a connection with that he can’t talk to anymore…and my teacher T.C. Boyle wrote on the story, “Louis this is stunning! Absolutely original!” Then one time on the way to class one day he asked me if I ever heard of a writer named, Julio Cortazar — and I hadn’t so he told me about this story “Night Face Up” and he told me I had a similar writing voice than Cortazar — he asked me how to pronounce it because he knew I spoke Spanish, but I didn’t know, and remember feeling a little embarrassed about it. Anyway, third place can be a very beautiful even to commemorate a time in your life…and that’s what the award did for me. It gave me what I felt was the first validation that my perspective could be noticed by a famous author like my professor T.C. Boyle.
Many great thinkers, artists, and leaders didn’t achieve perfection on their first try. Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Serena Williams has spoken about how learning from losses propelled her to greatness. Even tech giants embrace the “fail fast” mentality to innovate.
Conclusion: Redefine What Winning Means to You
Perfection is a mirage that can keep you stuck on the sidelines, too scared to risk imperfection.
Instead, set your sights on growth, resilience, and the courage to be imperfect. Aim for third place — where real learning happens, and where winning is redefined as the ongoing process of becoming better.
Because in the end, the best victory is a mind free to create, to fail, and to try again without fear.
It’s called living a good life, having a good adventure.
