[swayson]

Top athletes appear to have a general perspective on progress and self-development. Instead of comparing oneself to others, rather compare yourself today, relative to yourself yesterday, as a gauge on deliberate and precise progress towards the desirable outcome.

[obstacle1]

It's not an entirely relevant analogy though. It's good practice to seek mastery of craft. But an engineer in a team/organization has to navigate a system that is literally based around comparing peers, i.e. for promotions. There isn't really an objective metric for engineer performance, it's based pretty much entirely on what co-workers/managers/promo committees think of you.

This is not something athletes have to deal with, they can focus on improving personal performance and trust that it'll lead to an objective result (winning a race or game).