Being a good American, I am a great believer in competition. Not only do I love a good football game, I also love how competition drives down the prices of paper towels.
Having said that, however, I’m starting to wonder if perhaps competition is not necessarily the best approach to everything.
To explain, let me tell you an autobiographical tale.
When I was a kid, and I took up playing the string bass, I was very competitive, as my school experience had emphasized this approach to life.
My first “competition” was to beat the other kids auditioning for city-wide youth orchestra. Once I did that, my goal was to be better than the other high-school-age bass players therein. I eventually prevailed, and become the first chair player.
In both of these instances, yes, competition was a motivating factor. The problem was, once I got better than my competition, I ran out of motivation. After beating back all competitors, I fell into complacent stagnant self-satisfaction, as for 3 years I was “the best.”
I then went off to Boston to a college-level music school. Once there, I again found myself very low on the pecking order, and my competitive spirit drove me to work hard and get better than my competition.
My competition was pretty good, so I got to be pretty good too.
At this point though, things got somewhat vague. Once you get to a certain level of expertise, you eventually start to run out of competition. At the lower levels, it’s usually very clear that Jimmy is better than Johnny, but once I achieved a fairly high level of technical expertise, the “competition” became arbitrary. Once everyone involved knows where all the notes are, on what do you base the idea of “better” and “worse”? Was Heifetz better than Fritz Kreisler? How can you compare them, much less have them compete with one another? When I “won” this last competition, I found I had virtually no sense of personal direction. I was so busy trying to beat someone else in a given forum (or perhaps trying to avoid the shame of “losing”), I had never given much thought to my own unique goals.
Because competition tends to only make one a little bit better than the second-best person, and even then, often only by subjective standards, I can no longer rely upon competition as a motivating element in my life. I realize there are other professional speakers, and there are other authors, but I have absolutely no desire to compete with any of them, because to do so implies that I’m doing the same thing they are doing, only a little bit better. (Being just a little bit better than someone else is not an element of “brand.”) Since I’m doing something that is thoroughly unique to myself, I have no competition. Therefore I have to look for motivation somewhere else. I am trying to be the best I can be, not better than someone else.
Is our highest goal, either individually or as a nation, to simply be a little bit better than second-best? I like to think we can do better than that. But to do so requires a well defined higher ideal, not just a burning desire to “not lose.” If winning is your only goal, your life is forever run by those who create the competitions.
© Justin Locke
