Thoughts on Competitiveness

To put it simply (perhaps too simply); In order to truly master something you have to love it. In order to love something you have to love yourself (at least a certain part of yourself that the thing reflects). In other words, in order to master anything you have to love yourself. 

What tends to happen (at least to me) is people like something then immediately set a goal for themselves and then get frustrated when they can't achieve that goal quickly enough. After spending countless hours feeling tilted about losing at a video game, sounding bad on an instrument, getting angry about not meeting your self-met  (and probably ridiculously high) standards is only counter productive. It's easy to get caught up in the process of improving and periodically forgetting the passion that made you want to improve in the first place.