Smile ...

if mediocrity makes you feel more secure.

Know why I like sports? Competition. You don't get far resting on your laurels, and there's no whining about diversity when there's not enough of your own kind represented.

Make the cut today, you're in. Not good enough? You sit out this one. Come back another day with a better game, and you get another shot at winning.

I'm glad, being 40, to have come up in a day when it was expected for girls to be athletically competitive too, to play by a set of commonly accepted, established rules. The game loses something when you try to keep making them up as you go, to benefit this side or that.

Too many women of a certain age, I've noticed, are content to parade the "first woman this or that" label, as if that's good enough to keep you as an alpha leading the pack. As if they don't have to defend their results.

Nope. That can often lead to the downfall of the pack, you see. How you play today matters, no matter how much you like to think you're set for life. Take care that browning beneath your feet isn't the life draining out of your laurels, crushed by your weight resting on them.