Pursue excellence without turning every relationship into competition.

Turning everything into a contest ruins the relationships and does not even improve the work. Once you are ranking yourself against the people close to you, their good news becomes something to survive, and you lose both their honest help and your own honest judgment about what is worth doing. Excellence is a standard, and standards do not require anyone to lose.

Watch for the small flinch when someone near you does well. That flinch is the tell. Try congratulating them properly and then asking how they did it, which converts the whole reaction into something that actually serves your work.