Competition has always been a big part of my life. While I think it’s hard to examine where competitiveness falls on the nature vs. nurture scale, I think it’s safe to say somewhere in the middle. Winning gives many of us a mental boost, a dopamine release. Society re-enforces our desire to be at the top. We celebrate winners and history is written by the victors. It’s no surprise that being competitive is often something looked fondly upon.
Being the age of 24 and less than two years removed from my college graduation, I have experienced my fair share of interviews while searching for jobs. Each organization and prospective position are different, so the interviews have varied wildly and rarely seem to follow a similar track. However, my competitiveness has never been a topic I have left at home. To business owners, I have found it is a desired trait in a potential employee, so I would be foolish to not bring up one of the main reasons I’ve been able to get where I am today, right? While I’ve always seen my competitiveness as a positive, I’ve begun to realize it is not just a strength. There is a dark side to competitiveness that is a direct impediment to growth and success.
I grew up in a family that had no shortage of brains, athletic potential, or professional skills. There are plenty of scholarships, awards, and everyday instances to prove it. Consistently having such high standards to reach for developed a drive within me that helped me get to where I am today. While I was never likely to climb to quite the heights of my family did in their respective greatest strengths, I strived to round myself into something of a “best all-around” category. Growing up in a neighborhood of 6 boys only separated by a year in age was also key in my competitive development. We played 3-on-3 in a variety of sports, sometimes with the culmination of our battles in a series of games between the streets which connected us. Every afternoon and night you could find us playing hockey, football, basketball, baseball, soccer, trampoline dodgeball, nerf wars or kick the can. From the beginning, competitiveness wasn’t a choice, it was a necessity. While I didn’t notice it yet, the good and the bad within me as a competitor began showing itself from a young age.
The positive benefits associated with possessing that inner craving for victory are easy to see. The desire to win itself pushes us to be better than what we are in the moment. It gets the creative juices flowing and gives us a goal to strive for. With the accomplishment of goals, our individual definition of success and happiness can be achieved. Being a competitive individual doesn’t just benefit yourself though, which is partially why employers seek out these people. As they say, “competition breeds excellence.” Even the least competitive people typically do not like being outperformed by someone else, especially if there are monetary or approval benefits attached to performance. Take an under-performing team of individuals pursuing their interests and insert a highly competitive individual in the mix. You’re nearly guaranteed to see the team’s performance rise as a proportion of the increased talent added, but you’re also likely to see an increase greater than the sum of its parts. Even in a position where a team has differing responsibilities that are difficult to measure against, an intrinsically motivated individual can lead by example and attract others. A culture change can come from introducing competition or some type of motivation into a group. Soon enough, people begin to follow the new, positive example set.
Often, competition has a tipping point where all the benefits sharply turn bad. It can lead to jealousy, blaming others, and hurt relationships when you do not achieve your goals or are outperformed by someone else. There can be fallout over this from an individual standpoint. Thinking can become clouded, focus can become too funneled, and the fear of losing can become crippling. Many of the most successful individuals cite the agony of defeat as being stronger than the thrill of victory. However, there can be a point where the fear of losing leads us to stay in our comfort zone and only pursue easily attainable goals. Even worse, we might be so scared to lose that we only attempt favorable match-ups in life, or swear off competing at all. From a team standpoint, the problems are probably obvious. In the short-term there is likely to be a production hit. In the long run it can turn into a loss of chemistry and continued lack of success as a team.
I have not been immune to the flip side of competition, although I didn’t think about it for a long time. To me, competitiveness was something I had owed much of my successes to, while none of my failures. Looking back introspectively, that certainly is not the case. As a kid that loved watching sports, I wanted to be #1 in everything I did. I put maximum effort into everything I did and I played to win, no matter how serious it might seem to someone on the outside. I loved to make the moment seem bigger than it was. If the team I was on had fallen behind significantly I pictured my one of my favorite athletes in that sport getting into their zone and I channeled that energy. If we were dominating, I remembered the last biggest win we had as if it was in some official record book and would think, “can we win bigger?” If a game came down to the final moments, I imagined the most clutch moments I had seen in athletics and told myself “that’s what I’m going to do.” I never struggled to find motivation. At some point, I started getting all six of the neighborhood kids to rank each other by performance in each sport we played from 6th, or worst, to 1st, the best. It’s not difficult to see how this didn’t exactly create good morale in the group whenever I decided my desire to be seen as the best was more important than everyone being a good team. Luckily, I grew out of this and became the type of competitor truly focused on winning as a team, regardless of what role I had to play that day. But the sting of failure in an individual capacity still haunts me from time to time. Twice I recall being so focused on my lack of recognition that it led me into behaving as a bad teammate. Once a lacrosse teammate got an invite to a regional All-Star game I was sure I was going to get to play in. While the season had concluded, it was unfortunate that, as the captain of the team, I recoiled into myself rather than celebrating the honor he had received. The other time was following a company shakeup in which two coworkers were identified for promotions, while I was not, despite higher recent achievement. It turned out they were incorrectly identified for promotions but I had already shown my frustration. While disappointment in not reaching your goals is understandable, it should never lead you to bitterness or jealousy over others achieving theirs. I still had this to learn.
After a lot of thought of the positive and negative examples of competitiveness and the line that separates them, I began to wonder if there really is such a thing as competitive acts that don’t have a spectrum to them. Are there ways of being competitive where you can’t go too far, acts that only yields the best results? Because if there are, I must adopt them. I soon realized that I practice one type of competitiveness that I have yet to discover any negative side effects. In numerous areas of my life I try to improve upon my previous performance. I think searching for that internal drive to constantly be better than you were yesterday is important. It doesn’t mean you have to overthink it and obsess over the smallest things, but to strive to improve in the places that matter to you. Some areas could be your occupation, studies, relationships, hobbies, and so forth. I often look at my fitness and college experience as tangible examples of this. While running, I constantly look to up the ante a tad and challenge myself to push a little harder and dig a little deeper than I did the last time. The nice part is that this can often be seen in the form of personal records, or time dropping for a given distance. While pursuing a bachelor's degree at North Carolina State University, my semester GPA, and thus overall GPA, rose all but one semester. Obviously if you’re a genius and finish your first semester with perfection in the form of a 4.0, you’ll have to look for other goals to hone in on, but there’s always something that you could improve. I believe exercising this internal drive for improvement is a great way to show the ability to learn, and thus, help accomplish the expectations you have for yourself. The other method of faultless competitiveness that I’ve been able to identify is one I’ve far from mastered and I’m learning more about every day. It’s viewing failure as an opportunity. It’s viewing failure as an opportunity to improve, fail and improve, time and time again, until you win. Too often I have moved on to the next thing when this happens due to fear of failing again. It’s not always realistic, or even possible, to expect to be great at things when you first begin them. I used to have that unrealistic expectation and it didn’t necessarily stop me from trying things once, but it would keep me from trying a second or third time. When we fall it doesn’t have to keep us down. We have the strength to get back up again, contemplate what went wrong, strategize, and go for it again. We’ll probably fall again, but as long as we continue to get back up, we’re getting closer to where we want to be than where we were before. Those people are going to accomplish their dreams in this world today.
To write about competitiveness and my experience living a life full of it was an idea that evolved the more I thought about it. I have always been known by others as a competitive person, sometimes to a fault, but never put much more thought into it. I felt it was ingrained in me and something I had little to no control over. I have always taken the easy way out of self-evaluation. Once I finally started to look into the psychology of competitiveness and then began to truly think critically about it, my thoughts on it shifted dramatically. The lines between winning and losing are not as black and white as I once viewed them to be. Of course, between painted lines on a field in sports, I still feel it’s clear and don’t imagine I’ll change my mind soon! However, in everyday life, winning can be your definition and losing is an action in which you haven’t really lost until you quit. If you’re winning all the time you just aren’t challenging yourself enough. After all, at 24, I see that nobody is really undefeated, but that sure shouldn’t stop us from striving for greatness.
