How does he do it? You know, that friend that won’t stop playing until he’s beaten you handily? Doesn’t he realize it’s just ping pong? Damn! His serve is so fast, one miss and that little ball is blistering your cheek!
Don’t we all know someone like this? What seems like a birth defect, ie. Mr. Win-At-ALL-Costs tossing bean bags, oblivious to his kid’s birthday party, can come off as genetic superiority at work. After all, don’t many of our leaders profess to have or freely flaunt an ultra-competitive attitude?
Why can’t we all be more like that?
In reality, we can, and that’s what’s scary. Think about what it really means to be that competitive. Is it realistic? Is it productive? Here are four reasons why competitiveness, left unchecked, can be a losing strategy:
There will always be someone better than you.
I’m sure you’ve won something before. Felt good, didn’t it? Scoreboards and sales reports are nice ways to tell everyone (including yourself) how great you are. From that point onward, did you always win? Probably not.
Unfortunately, winning can feel so good we don’t want to wake up from it. However, the moment you become the best kid in the neighborhood, there’s someone from the other side of town who’s willing to test you. When I was a kid I thought the phrase, “Pride cometh before the fall.”, had something to do with the seasons of the year. Get this, it means that someone will always be better than you.
Therefore, needing to be the “best” is largely a waste of time.
You will miss out on the enjoyment of your craft.
No one is more deceiving than pro athletes and musicians. That three pointer that Lebron easily makes while jumping backwards is anything but easy. Heck, try picking up a guitar and doing that finger-tapping-on-the-strings thing like Eddie Van Halen. I did, and it sounded like a bag of staplers. Virtuosos make the impossible look easy.
Little do we realize, the part of the job we see only makes up a small percentage of the actual work these entertainers do. Hours of meticulous practice, travel, and promotion build the backbone of their stardom.
Hero worship aside, few of us envy the countless setbacks and hours of practice that come with such a high level of success. THAT, my friend is the real work, and if you love it as much as the applause, you’ll go far. If a career was a meal, our wins would be only the dessert or the wine.
You will miss out on relationships, both professional and personal.
Many of us make this mistake, especially in competitive environments like sales. Do you really want to see you coworker trip as she steps up to the stage for her award? If you knew how much the two of you have in common, you might actually be happy for her.
Yeah, I know. Many of us get compared and ranked against each other at work. Rarely, however, do the perks of competitiveness outweigh the benefits of sharing. Most co-workers face similar day-to-day challenges. Your willingness to lose to a rival may just get you the vital information you need to be more marketable, within your company and beyond.
If we share our struggles at work, we can form strong bonds, even friendships. And, in case you needed a reminder, friends help us with all aspects of life, not just with things like how to update our laptop OS. Even the best, most successful work teams split up. Good friendships can continue on.
You’ll stunt your own growth.
At its best, our competitiveness helps us focus. Never will you run faster (or have a higher tolerance for sweaty, stinky people) than at a 5k. Of course, the same performance benefit is true in other pursuits. The drive to compete is how humans and other animals survive, or so we think.
We sometimes picture natural selection as animals fighting for the same piece of meat. Only the strongest survive! Meanwhile, reality was a war of attrition. The weakest animals didn’t lose some Lion Kingesque battle to the death; they simply failed to pass on their genes. The lesson? If we spend too much time fighting each other we ignore the real enemy: our own weaknesses. And winning only fools us into thinking we don’t have any.
So, do you lack competitiveness? Do you lose more than you win? I’d wager these “faults” have made you more realistic, more likely to improve, and a lot easier to be around than any self-proclaimed winners. And, isn’t that something to be thankful for?
Sincerely,
Meaning2work.com
Ps. For a deeper dive into human motivation, check out The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win by Jeff Haden. I also really liked a recent Episode of Ryan Holiday’s Podcast entitled The Daily Stoic: We’re lucky not to get what we want.