Hemingway wasn't telling you to compete with yourself — he was pointing out that the comparison most adults run all day, with the people around them, is ranking the wrong variable entirely
Hemingway said this, or some version of it, somewhere across his various writings, and the line has been floating around the wider culture ever since. The standard reading tends to receive it as motivational quotation, the kind of thing that ends up on the walls of CrossFit gyms and on the desks of self-improvement consultants. The implication is that the line is telling the reader to focus on personal growth rather than competing with the people around them.
The standard reading is partly right. The line is, in some real way, redirecting the reader's attention away from external comparison and toward internal comparison. The standard reading is also not paying particularly close attention to what the line is actually doing.
What the line is doing, more specifically, is pointing at two different orientations adults can take toward the question of how they evaluate themselves, and naming one of them as the one that produces what most adults are looking for when they use words like "nobility" or "growth" or "becoming a better person." The other orientation, the one most adults actually default to, produces something different that the wider register has not quite distinguished from the first.
What the two orientations actually are
The first orientation, the one most adults default to without quite registering they are doing it, is comparison with the people around them. The adult moves through the wider environment and, in selected moments throughout the day, registers the various ways the other adults compare to themselves. The other adult is making more money. The other adult has the better-looking partner. The other adult is in better physical shape. The other adult is more accomplished in their professional domain. The various small ongoing comparisons produce, in the adult conducting them, a continuous low-grade ranking of where they sit in the wider social hierarchy.
The ranking is real. The ranking has been the operating system of most adult social cognition for as long as humans have been organizing themselves into groups. The ranking is also, on close examination, almost entirely useless for the question of whether the adult is actually becoming the kind of person they would, in principle, want to become.
The reason the ranking is useless is that the comparison is calibrated to external features rather than to anything connected to the adult's own development. The other adult who is making more money may be miserable. The other adult with the better-looking partner may be in a hollow relationship. The various external features the comparison is calibrated to are not particularly informative about the substantive quality of the underlying lives the comparison is operating on. The comparison is, in some real way, ranking the wrong variable.
The second orientation, the one Hemingway is pointing at, is comparison with one's own former self. The adult is not, in this orientation, asking how they compare to the other adults in the wider environment. The adult is asking, more specifically, how they compare to who they were six months ago, a year ago, five years ago. The comparison is calibrated to a variable the adult actually has direct access to and can meaningfully evaluate.
Why the second comparison is harder
The honest acknowledgment is that the second comparison is considerably harder to conduct than the first. The reasons are worth examining.
The first reason is that the second comparison requires the adult to actually remember who they were six months ago, a year ago, five years ago, with enough accuracy to make the comparison meaningful. The remembering is non-trivial. The apparatus has, by design, been continuously updating its model of who the adult is, in ways that tend to smooth over the differences between the current self and the previous self. The continuous updating is what makes the apparatus functional. The continuous updating is also what makes the comparison with the former self harder to conduct, because the former self is not, in most cases, available for direct inspection.
The second reason is that the comparison with the former self does not produce the small dopamine reward that the comparison with other adults produces. The comparison with other adults, when it goes the way the adult wants, produces a small sense of being ahead. The comparison with the former self, when it goes the way the adult wants, produces a quieter sense of having developed in particular ways across the relevant period. The two are not the same. The wider environment is calibrated to reward the first kind of comparison and to mostly ignore the second.
The third reason is that the comparison with the former self, when conducted honestly, sometimes produces the uncomfortable recognition that the adult has not, in any meaningful sense, developed across the relevant period. The recognition is uncomfortable. The recognition is also the precondition for any actual development. The adult who is willing to honestly register the stagnation is the adult who is in a position to address it. The adult who is not willing to register the stagnation is the one who will continue to stagnate.
What the line is not saying
It is worth being honest about what the line is not saying, because the wider register has tended to absorb it in ways that overextend the underlying claim.
The line is not saying that the adult should be in continuous competition with their own former self. The continuous-competition framing is what the contemporary self-improvement register has done with the line, and the framing produces a particular kind of low-grade ongoing pressure that the original line was not calibrated to produce. The continuous competition produces, in most adults who attempt it, a different version of the same exhaustion that the comparison with other adults produces. The variable has changed. The mechanism is the same.
The line is saying, more specifically, that when the adult does decide to evaluate themselves, the comparison that produces useful information is the comparison with the former self. The decision to evaluate is not, in itself, something the adult should be doing continuously. The evaluation should be conducted at appropriate moments, with appropriate seriousness, and in ways that produce actual information about whether the adult has been developing or not. The evaluation should not be a continuous background activity that the adult runs throughout the day in the way the comparison with other adults tends to operate.
The distinction matters. The continuous-comparison-with-other-adults configuration produces, in most adults, the exhaustion of always feeling that one is behind or ahead. The continuous-comparison-with-former-self configuration produces, in most adults who attempt it, a different version of the same exhaustion. The actually useful configuration is the periodic-evaluation-with-former-self configuration, in which the comparison is conducted at appropriate intervals with appropriate seriousness, and in which the rest of the time is allocated to the actual work of being and becoming rather than to the continuous monitoring of either.
Why the comparison with the former self produces what the line calls nobility
The reason the comparison with the former self produces what Hemingway is calling nobility is worth attending to.
The comparison with other adults, even when it goes the adult's way, produces something that is not connected to the adult's actual character. The adult who is ahead of the other adults in the wider environment may be ahead for reasons that have nothing to do with anything the adult has done. The adult may be ahead because of inherited resources, luck, the various features of the underlying environment that the adult had no role in producing. The comparison registers as a win, but the winning is not, in any meaningful sense, calibrated to the adult themselves.
The comparison with the former self is calibrated to the adult themselves. The adult who is, on honest evaluation, different from who they were five years ago in ways the adult is responsible for has, in some real way, produced the development. The development is the adult's own. The development is what the line is pointing at when it uses the word nobility. The nobility is not located in being better than the other adults. The nobility is located in having become better than the previous version of oneself through the work that produced the development.
What is worth noting is that this kind of nobility is almost entirely invisible from outside. The adult who has done the work of becoming different from their former self is not, in most cases, going to be registered by the wider environment as having done so. The wider environment is calibrated to register the visible features of external comparison rather than the invisible features of internal development. The adult's nobility, in the sense the line is pointing at, is therefore a private accomplishment that the adult is, in most cases, the only person who is in a position to verify.
What I want to acknowledge, finally
I am thirty-eight and I have been, in the last few years, attempting some version of this practice in my own case. The practice is harder than the description above makes it sound. The harder part is not the comparison itself. The harder part is the discipline of not allowing the comparison-with-other-adults configuration to keep reasserting itself as the default mode of self-evaluation, which it does several times per day in the contemporary environment.
The wider environment, in some real way, is calibrated to produce the comparison-with-other-adults configuration in the people moving through it. The various platforms and social configurations the wider environment runs on are, by design, surfacing the external features of other adults' lives in ways that make the comparison almost automatic. The not-comparing requires the adult to do the small ongoing work of redirecting their own attention away from the surfaced features and back toward the internal question of whether they themselves are developing in ways that they would, on honest evaluation, recognize as substantive.
The redirecting is small. The redirecting is, on the available evidence of the adults I have watched do this work, what most of the visible character of the adults who have actually developed across decades is produced by. The development is the work. The work is what Hemingway was pointing at. The wider register would benefit, on close examination, from absorbing the specificity of what the line is actually saying, rather than absorbing the line as motivational quotation calibrated to producing the same exhausting performance the original framing was, in some real way, designed to refuse.
