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Have you ever thought about your habits while pursuing a goal? Are you the type of person who is motivated by competition? Some people, in order to perform well, need to be pushed by the performance of others.
Do we have to be competitive in order to succeed? Is a competitive mindset a requirement to be successful in life? The writer of this essay shares her thoughts on the role of competition in the pursuit of success.
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Is Competition Necessary to Achieve Success?
When I think about competition, I always remember my friend Sadie, who is the most competitive person I know. It doesn’t even have to be a strictly competitive sport – it can be a party game or a casual board game, and she will put all her effort into it, just for the satisfaction of winning.
When I ask her if what she does makes her even more anxious and tense during the process, she said that it actually gave her a positive rush. The fact that other people were attempting to reach the same goal as she caused her to be even more determined to emerge as the winner. She said that competition teaches her to be more focused, not just in the academic world, but in all of life. She even mentioned that her strongest competitor is herself, as she has to overcome a lot of her fears, self-destructive habits, and uncertainties to move through an obstacle. She will not stop competing until she has achieved every milestone she has set for herself.
In this essay, I would like to share key principles that I’ve learned about competing with Sadie.
Healthy competition is essential to success
Whatever your story, interest, or end goal, we all need external motivation to remind us of what it takes to achieve victory. While there is merit in simply reminding ourselves of our goal or reading self-help blogs to keep us moving forward, there is nothing like competing to remind us what it will cost us to not get to our destination.
I have personally failed to appreciate what healthy competition teaches me in my individual pursuits. Oftentimes I would tell myself that it doesn’t matter what my opponent’s mistakes are just so long as I get the result I want. But part of being competitive is to learn from the mistakes of the opponent’s team so that I can enhance my own strategies.
It must also be said that not all competition is healthy. Some people aim to win by hurting others or bringing them down or saying yes to prestigious opportunities at the expense of others. I think this is the kind of approach that ends up separating people long after someone has won or lost. These are also people who take defeat personally, to the point that they will seek revenge at the next opportunity.
Friendly competition is healthy because it prioritizes people over processes. It doesn’t mean that cut people slack or that we try to step aside so that others can take the win. But it does mean that we don’t put success on a pedestal, so much so that we would be willing to let work ethic slide in order to avoid a poor outcome.
Adversity helps us suffer defeats honorably
Being competitive doesn’t mean we will win all the time. We will still take our losses. From a young age, Sadie learned that even those unexpected circumstances work to take you in new directions towards achieving success.
If you have achieved success and failures in life, then you will know what it’s like to lose. It grounds you and humbles you. Losing to someone forces you to remember that you don’t control everything and that there is always something new to learn. Losses are an essential part of accepting that your wins don’t define you. It rids you of the unhealthy temptation to believe that you are invincible. This is a damaging narrative that creates self-destructive habits.
The competition involves setting goals that are rooted in purpose
Truly healthy competition teaches lessons on proper goal-setting. It becomes more than just performing a specific task. A worthy competitor is able to articulate why achieving victory is particularly crucial to him or her. You can participate in all the largest competitions in the world or represent your county in individual sports, but if you don’t have a bigger “Why” behind why you are competing, success will be shallow.
When you are in direct competition with others, you learn to integrate others’ strengths and weaknesses into the equation. You become more strategic in leveraging your own skill and even your own team in order to win. Competition creates strategic people who will go just one more mile in order to dominate his or her competitors.
Internal competition is the toughest of all
Ultimately, just like Sadie said, you are competing against yourself. You may have factored in the skill set of your competitors, but if you fail to take stock of your own blind spots, then the whole process is only a mediocre teacher of knowing yourself to overcome yourself.
As a human being, we are programmed to not be able to see ourselves honestly when we don’t intentionally strive to do so. It is a terrible suggestion to forget repeated mistakes because these patterns make us acutely aware of how we generally approach things. If we are willing to dig deep within ourselves and confront our biggest struggles and obstacles, then we will be the best students of our own experiences.
Conclusion: Competition teaches us that we can keep growing
Many self-help gurus will tell you that you can only get stronger after losing. I think that if we face healthy opposition, this is true. But if we view competition negatively and avoid it, then we will continue to be mediocre in all of our endeavors and we will never see our situation clearly. Competing teaches us that both winning or losing against all odds will prune our character.
FAQs
What Are The Traits Of A Competitive Person?
A true competitor has the ability to create internal competition within himself or herself. He or she recognizes that true opposition lies within. Therefore, he or she is willing to look at blind spots and confront weaknesses in order to develop better strategies to achieve success. He or she is also teachable. Whether they take an online class on improving techniques or learn from self-help blogs, they are willing to do what it takes to perfect their craft.
Finally, they avoid going back to the same position before competing. They always view the process as a path to growth, so they should always emerge from a win or loss as better people than they were previously. This means that they have the gift of insight and hindsight. They also recognize that repeated mistakes force them to break unhealthy habits and start new ones.
Is competition necessary for improvement?
Whether you like it or not, you will always have direct competition in everything, whether yourself or others, so there’s no point in avoiding it. It is one of the few things in life that have the powerful ability to cause growth. Self-help is a good approach to take, but there is nothing like external pressures to remind you of what’s at stake. Whether you are competing individually or in larger groups, knowing that there are possibly others out there who are after the same thing as it motivates you to go the extra mile.