Apples to Apples

I spent part of this past weekend in Lexington, Kentucky for the Kentucky-Tennessee Key Club District Convention. It’s the second time I’ve keynoted the event, and I’ve always enjoyed the time with the great student leaders in the organization. I had some time on Friday before my keynote, so I ended up walking around the hotel a bit, and using the free internet in the hotel lobby.

I was reading a news article about the tragedy in Japan, when I heard a group of students ask me, “Do you want to play Apples to Apples?”

I’m a big fan of the game ever since first playing with a group of my friends from Comedy Sportz several years ago. The basic concept–try to get your card (a noun of proper noun) selected to best match an adjective. Your cards can range from “my room” to “Oprah” to “landing on the moon.” It almost always provokes laughter. I sat down with the students and we started playing.

I like to have fun with the game, arguing for certain cards (not always my own), and against others. In Friday’s game, I was able to successfully claim that “Prince Charming” was in no way “intelligent” (think about it–guy based his attraction on whether a shoe fit–didn’t he look at her face at all?)

The students playing the game with me were all good sports. They put up with my comments and even challenged me back. They always said hello in the hallways and we continued to joke about the game and the quick inside jokes we had developed in the hour we had played.

One thought jumped out at me while playing… at one point we were joking about how opposite cards were getting selected, and I claimed “hey, the game is called ‘Apples to Apples,’ not ‘Pears to Peaches!'” We laughed about it in that moment. We even brought up the phrase a few more times during the weekend. But later on, during one part of my speech when I talked about how we compare ourselves far too often and look at our “deficiencies,” it occurred to me that we our “deficient” because we spend our lives doing “Pears to Peaches” rather than “Apples to Apples.” We find something way outside our reach and then we say, “I’m not good enough. I’m not smart. I’m not fast. I’m not attractive. I’m not talented.”

The phrase we continue to hear is “I’m not.”

Now “I’m not” saying we need to remove all comparisons. I believe there can be something incredibly beneficial about setting up a benchmark and striving to achieve it. I do believe we can learn from those we strive to be like.

But in the process of getting there, we need to make sure we’re looking at the appropriate measurements of progress. Almost every athlete or musician or actor or political leader spent a great deal of time working behind the scenes long before the camera was ever on them. When we compare ourselves, we shouldn’t look first to their achievement, but rather initially to their work ethic. It takes time and energy.

Let’s compare those apples, and then see what we CAN do.