Competition

I understand competition because I am a competitor.  I played basketball and baseball at a fairly high level in high school and competed collegiately.  However, that’s not what makes me a competitor.

I am a competitor because if you give me a task in which I can beat someone, I will do everything in my power to beat him.  If there is a pick-up basketball game in someone’s driveway, I’m the one maniac diving for loose balls on the asphalt.  If I’m sitting in a class and the professor gives us a challenge, I’m the one who cheers if he wins, and spends the next half hour stewing—oblivious to the lecture—if he loses.  You may know other competitors, but you don’t know anybody more competitive than I am.

(A small subset of you finished that last paragraph and thought, “Oh yeah?  Says who?  I bet I’m more competitive than you.  Bring it on.”  If that was your response, please remember that I would have responded similarly—only moreso.)

The world is full of people who are, to greater or lesser degrees, competitors.  American capitalist society is built on our backs.  Competition drives us toward greater and greater excellence and excellence, generally speaking, makes the world better.

Of course, the assertion that competition always makes the world a better place is absurd on its face.  Gang rivalries leave hundreds of people dead every year.  Competitive investment banking just about ran the world economy off a cliff at the start of the Great Recession. 

More personally, sharpening fingernails is an ignoble method of achieving victory.  In fact, you could say that I won the smaller victory of taking home the championship trophy, but lost the larger contest of acting the most ethically and nobly.  As I grew up and reflected on things, I came gradually to realize that the greater victories are achieved by striving toward excellence in the greater and more important arenas.

Reflect on your own priorities, especially as they connect to life’s most important questions.  Do you work harder toward excellence in less important areas than you do in the most important areas?  Are you acting in accordance with what you really believe? 

In our competitive culture, we quite often associate competitive success with success in the arenas that are most distinctly competitive, rather than the arenas that are most weighty.  It is easy for us to glorify the person who crossed the finish line first, because it is easy for us to identify her.  It is harder to glorify the person who showed the most love toward her neighbor, because it is harder for us to quantify.  But, according to your beliefs, which of them should really be thought of as the greater victor?