lamp light on the desk
pages scatter in the breeze
ink waits for the hand
Don’t try to be the best—be the only.
It sounds simple, almost careless, like advice you could scrawl on the back of a receipt. But I keep returning to it, like a stone I find myself picking up each time I walk the river.
Because being the best is a game you rarely win. The measure shifts, the rules change, the ladder extends further the moment you climb it. To be the best is to chase shadows.
But to be the only—that’s different. To find the thing you can do that no one else can, not because you work harder, but because it is distinctly yours. That becomes the compass. That becomes the gift.
I remember sitting once in a café in Porto, early morning, rain sliding down the windows in slow, deliberate drops. The place was nearly empty. A man across from me was sketching in a notebook. His lines were messy, uneven, but alive. I couldn’t tell if he was talented in the way schools define talent. What I saw was something else: the lines were his, so much so that no one else could have drawn them.
I thought then, the world doesn’t need more copies. It needs originals. It needs the things that are strange and personal, things that don’t fit neatly into categories.
When I was younger, I tried to be the best. In school, in sports, in the quiet competitions that nobody admits but everyone feels. I learned quickly that the best is temporary. Someone faster will arrive. Someone smarter will pass you. Even your own younger self will outshine you in certain memories. Best is a shifting target, and the chase leaves you hollow.
But when I look back at the notebooks my mother gave me when I was sixteen, filled with uneven handwriting, half-thought sentences, and sketches that looked nothing like what they were meant to be, I see something else. I see myself, raw and distinct. Not the best. But the only.
Those early pages had no polish, no thought of audience. They were just attempts to make sense of the world. And in their unevenness, they carried a voice that was mine alone.
The only is not about comparison. It’s about subtraction.
Strip away the noise, the borrowed opinions, the gestures imitated from others. What remains—the stubborn core, the crooked handwriting, the rhythm of your breath—is the only.
It doesn’t arrive clean. It arrives cracked, awkward, half-formed. But that’s the point. That crack is where the light gets in, where the signal comes through.
Once, in Kyoto, I wandered into a small shop that sold handmade pottery. The shelves were crowded with bowls and cups, some lopsided, some glazed unevenly. At first glance, they looked imperfect compared to the machine-polished sets you see everywhere. But the owner smiled as I picked one up.
“That one,” she said, “is my favorite. No one could ever make it again. Even me.”
I turned it in my hands. The glaze bled into unexpected patterns, a fingerprint of fire and chance. It wasn’t the best bowl I had ever seen. But it was the only. And that made it priceless.
Leaning into what makes you different doesn’t guarantee applause. Sometimes it guarantees silence. Sometimes it guarantees misunderstanding. But over time, that difference becomes your advantage.
Think of the street musicians who play the same songs you’ve heard a hundred times. They blend into the background. Then think of the one who plays an instrument you don’t recognize, or bends the notes until they sound like something you’ve never heard. You stop. You listen. You remember.
Originals create pause.
Copies pass unnoticed.
A few months ago, I was walking along the Aare in Bern. The river was high, moving fast from the snowmelt. A boy stood at the edge, throwing sticks into the current. Each one spun, caught in the same bend, and disappeared. After a while he stopped, picked up a stone instead, and tossed it in. The splash was messy, uneven, different from the elegant drift of the sticks. But the stone sank straight to the bottom, cutting through the water with weight.
I thought: that’s the difference between best and only. The stick floats where all others float. The stone sinks to where only it can sink.
When you lean into your only, it doesn’t just set you apart. It sets you free. Because suddenly you’re no longer running a race whose finish line keeps moving. You’re walking your own path, strange as it may be, with a compass that doesn’t lie.
And the funny thing is: people sense it. They might not understand why, but they feel the weight, the texture, the presence of something that isn’t borrowed.
Your originality becomes your signal. Your way of saying, “This is mine. This is me. This is the gift I bring.”
Being the best is a sprint. Being the only is a pilgrimage.
And the path of the only is not about achievement. It’s about recognition. Recognition of yourself in the bowl that can’t be remade, in the notebook filled with uneven lines, in the sketch across a rainy café window. Recognition that what makes you different is not a weakness to be trimmed but a compass to be followed.
The sun had dropped lower in the meadow outside. The bird that had been perched on the rail took flight, vanishing into the tall grass. The jug of water on the table caught the last light and glowed, as if it had been waiting to teach the same lesson all along:
Best fades.
Only lasts.
life 
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