I just had coffee with a freshman at Mizzou and he asked me a question I can’t stop thinking about: How can I stand out compared to students at Stanford?

I told him, I wouldn't even think about anyone else. 

Too many people get caught up in trying to compete with other people. They’re in a rush. They think they must do X, Y, Z before they're 30 and if they don’t—they're falling behind their peers. 

This is the completely wrong way to go about life. You should be waking up every day competing with yourself. Each day should be an incremental improvement.

In the back of your mind, you know how everyone else is doing. You see what they're doing good, what they're doing wrong and learn from that. But also that shouldn't affect how you perceive your own journey and struggle.

“To improve, compare little things. To be miserable, compare big things. Comparison is the thief of joy when applied broadly, but the teacher of skills when applied narrowly.” – James Clear

Same thing with startups. You shouldn't be worried about competition. You can’t control them. I’m not saying your competition shouldn’t be in your mind at all. I’m saying they should be in the back of your mind, not the front.

And I see people make this mistake not just with their competitors but with their friends too. Competing against others leads to jealousy and envy. Competing against yourself leads to growth and peace. Make the call. 

The perception of good is obviously in the eyes of whoever is reading the resume or talking to you. If someone has a filter solely based on logos, that’s fine, it just means they trust someone else’s filter. It’s not a bad filter, it’s just easy and you miss a lot of diamonds in the rough.

For Redbud, we didn't come from those backgrounds and have no bias towards flashy resumes. I would want to know the person's path to achieving on paper pedigree. What did that person do under constraint?

The best students at a general flagship state university like Mizzou are just as good as the best students at Harvard or Stanford. It's the average that is really different. The top 20% of students at both are very tangential, the bottom 80% are not. 

I think somebody who went to Mizzou and is exceptional actually has a leg up to somebody that's at a prestigious institution, because there is a slight chip on your shoulder and that constraint is great. To the average person, you're not as exceptional as students graduating from prestige. And that chip on your shoulder will help drive you in a different way than somebody who doesn’t need creativity to open doors.

I told him this: If you’ve become exceptional without relying on pedigree, that’s a signal I’d bet on any day.