Running Someone Else's Race
What my son taught me about rushing.
One afternoon, I sat down to teach my son how to recite a prayer. He’s almost seven. It felt like it was time.
I’d read a line first, then he’d repeat it back. Word by word. That’s how we do it.
Three times, four times. Still not sticking. I could feel myself getting impatient. I wanted him to just get it. I wanted it over so I could get back to my own work.
A friend’s kid, same age, already prays properly in jama’ah. No drama. From start to finish, without losing his place. Another one has memorized a handful of short surahs.
I witnessed it myself. Nobody told me. It just lodged itself somewhere in my brain.
When will mine?
We don’t call it comparison. We call it concern. I just want to make sure my kid is okay. But it’s comparison. It always is.
And the strange thing about comparison is that it doesn’t slow you down. It speeds you up. You stop teaching and start drilling. You stop noticing the small things and start measuring against a benchmark you didn’t set.
Quietly. Without realizing it. Until one day you notice it’s just… how you see your own child.
Here’s what I didn’t expect
I do the exact same thing with my work.
I run a small indie business designing and selling templates on marketplaces. Every time I’m building a new asset, I want to skip ahead. Get to the launch. Check the email. See if anyone bought it.
So I rush.
I want to skip the part where it’s slow, the part where nothing seems to be happening, and get straight to the part that lookslike success.
I keep forgetting that nothing is happening is the part where it’s actually happening.
There’s already so much there, if I’m honest. Over 49,000 people downloaded a template I made. Strangers have messaged me to say it helped them land a job, build a proposal, get a client. These are real things. And somehow I keep looking past them.
It came through the part I keep trying to skip.
The process is the work. The patience is the work. The repetition is the work.
And somewhere out there maybe there is someone looking at where I am right now and wondering when they’ll get there. I forget that, too.
My son will learn his prayer when he learns it. His pace is his own.
But where we’re all headed, for him, for me, for any Muslim parent quietly hoping to raise a child who turns toward Allah. We’re just walking there on our own roads, at our own pace. It only feels like a race when you measure your road against someone else’s.
The same is true at work.
The people ahead of me aren’t running toward what I’m running toward. I work to fulfill my obligations, to provide for my family, to do the things I actually care about. Not to be compared against someone else’s journey.
The roads look different. Where it all leads is the same.
There’s a quieter cost underneath all the rushing. When we spend our days measuring against someone else’s pace, we slowly stop being grateful for our own, instead we start treating our lives like rough drafts of someone else’s.
That’s the real cost. Not the missed launch, not the slow month, the quiet erosion of alhamdulillah. The part where we forget to thank Him for the very thing we used to pray for.
My son repeated the phrase back to me last night. Still not quite there, but almost. He looked up to see if I’d noticed.
I smiled at him.
So. Are you actually in a hurry? Or did someone else decide that for you?