The Point

When you get really good at something, when you become the best, it loses all meaning. Say I were to become a great baseball pitcher. I pitch a perfect game every night, strike after strike, no exceptions. What is there, then, left to do? Nothing. Perfection is meant to be an unreachable goal, but what happens when you manage it?
There are people who live for no other purpose than to be the best. In recent years this trend has applied to education, Japanese and American parents pushing their children to be #1 in absolutely everything.
Another scenario, this one not so hypothetical: I am ranked #1 in the country grade-wise, president of the National Honor Society, leader of Academic decathlon, UIL participant, etc. ad nauseum. Say I have done all of these things, in preparation for some planned out future in which my complete superiority will be an asset. Then what? What do I have?
There are people like this, who live there lives with purely extrinsic motivation. They live to be the best, to prove that they are #1. They fill their days with studying, working, frantically memorizing. They glory in their own successes and the failures of their rivals. They have no friends, only temporary allies.
I ask you, What kind of life is that? Can they be truly happy? We will never know. They believe that they are happy, and who am I to disagree? But how can these people, these anomalies who have lived their lives in the pursuit, not of personal betterment, but of undisputed superiority, how can they know what happiness is? To be indoctrinated in this way is to ensure the lifelong success of your child, but also to forever deny them the knowledge of true, personal happiness.
Not once will they accomplish a feat or task merely because it makes them happy to do so, but only to receive the reward of dominance in the end.
I am eternally thankful that I am not the best. I feel that I have cheated the system. I know, deep within myself that I could be one of these people, that I was born for it, to be utterly superior to all my peers, but I am not. I am not one of these people, I am a human being. Imperfect, flawed, and all the same better for it. The horror of being so driven by extrinsic goals that I reached the final mountain peak of intellectual completion rocks my mind even as I struggle to comprehend what it would even mean. To be done with improving. It's unnatural.
The Point, I suppose, is that no matter how I, we, strive to be the best, to improve unto perfection, it isn't what we want. We want the struggle, the hunt for improvement. We cease to be Human when lose our need to be better. We lose that competitive spark that allowed us to beat out the other pathetic proto-humans and become Man.
Perfection, more than anything else in the realm of feasible expression, is death.