On Competition
Terminology alert: Competition = “A situation in which two or more people are working towards the same goal without necessarily cooperating”
People are motivated by competition. Like any other source of motivation (love, fear, pity, hunger, etc.), competition can push us towards being the best versions of ourselves, or push us towards destructive behavior. In this post I’ll explore the different mechanisms through which competition can motivate us to action, and then discuss how we can harness our competitive nature in a way that pushes us to do good.
There are a few different ways that we might be motivated by the knowledge that somebody else is striving for the same goal that we are. Here are all the different manifestations of competitive motivation I can think of:
If the goal is rival, so my success in achieving the goal depends on your failure to achieve the goal (e.g. in winning a sports competition, getting a contract, winning an election), then the desire to achieve this goal equates to a desire to be better than you.
Even if the goal is not rival, I can still be motivated by my own pride to be better than you just because I don’t like the idea of someone being better than me at something (e.g., playing the harmonica, expounding poetically about jazz music, baking cookies, the kinds of things we all are really prideful about).
Other people with the same goals as me can serve as a reflection of the type of person I want to be. It’s much easier to imagine myself writing a novel when I see my friend do it. And it’s much harder for me to make excuses for not working towards my goals when I see somebody else working hard.
So how can we harness these feelings of competitive pressure in order to be the best versions of ourselves possible? I propose a couple general guidelines:
Reframe your rival goals as non-rival goals: Competition for rival goals tends to be the type of competition that brings out the worst in us. Because basically, if the only way I can succeed is for you to fail, then I am incentivized to hurt you and disposed to rejoice at your misfortune — neither of which are healthy. But in many cases (not quite all, but maybe most cases), I can shift my goal away from succeeding in this zero-sum competition, and towards a more fundamental achievement of excellence.
Some examples:
Instead of having my goal be to win a swimming race, my goal can be to swim the best race that I can possibly swim.
I can reframe a desire to get a job at someone else’s expense to be a desire for me to be extremely capable so that the employer has great options when deciding who to choose for the job.
Even when competing in an election, you could reframe your fundamental goal from being “I want to win this election” to being “I want to ensure that the people clearly understand what I would do if I win this election, so that they can make the best decision about who to vote for”.
Reframing goals in this way is not always easy and requires a degree of selflessness and ego-control. But the times I have been able to do it, I have a degree of peace and confidence that I don’t feel when my goal is to achieve at someone else’s expense.
Pride is a crutch for when your intrinsic motivation isn’t enough. Imagine that, much to the delight of the kids in my neighborhood, I put up crazy amounts of Christmas decorations every year (including lights that flash in sequence, actual reindeer, animatronic nutcrackers performing a synchronized dance to a Trans-Siberian Orchestra song, the whole deal). It would be great if I was motivated to do this out of a fundamental desire to bring joy to the kids in my neighborhood. But maybe if I’m honest with myself, the real reason I work so hard at putting up these decorations is because Brian across the street just got a giant inflatable Santa, and there’s no way in heck I’m going to let him out-do me this year.
It’s still better to act based on this prideful motivation than to not act at all (as long as I don’t go so far as to sneak over at night and stab Santa in the kidneys with a carving knife). The kids are still getting the joy of my decorations, regardless of my motivations. So I can accept that in this case my intrinsic desire to delight the children of my neighborhood isn’t enough, and I can harness my prideful desire to be better than Brian to motivate me to do good. Maybe next year I’ll be a better person, but for now I’ve got to work with what I have.