Day Thirty Five: Competitive

I am not at all competitive.

This is the main reason that even though I am significantly athletic, I was never very good at sports. I have no ingrained desire to beat another person, party or team. The only person I concern myself with doing better than is myself. I can only push myself above my own capabilities and challenge myself to set new records. I don’t need to be lauded as the best, better or anything else.

My lack of competition drove my parents nuts as a child. Piano, dance, voice, fencing competitions all went by with good rankings but I never cared about where I placed. I didn’t need trophies or medals as a child, I was never interested in winning awards at school or in sports. Similarly in work I don’t compete to be the best; I share the work and the credit, get things done and feel satisfied with the results of my efforts.

As a child, I watched my father turn everything my brother did into a competition. When my brother played soccer, my dad always bothered him to practice so he could score more goals. Cross country, practice to win more races. Tae-kwon-do; practice to win more fights. My father has always equated practice and effort with winning, which in a way we know is true. But in his world, it wasn’t that if you practiced enough you would win, it was that if you didn’t win, you weren’t practicing enough. There was no moment of reward, no instant of love and consideration. No pride. Just a constant striving for the next win, for the next trophy, for the next game.

And while mentalities similar to my father’s have heralded the greatest athletes of our age, our only goal as children was to have fun. There is a time and place for competitiveness and my father never learned when to push and when to back off. As a result my brother and I ended up hating our activities and neither my brother nor I harbor a competitive edge.

You need competitiveness to succeed, you say? Your definition of success is limited. My brother and I lack competitiveness, but are overflowing with innovation. While the rats of the world are content to compete to see who can run fastest in their wheels, innovation forges new paths. There is no competition in fields that others have never touched.

Challenge to my Readers:

Let someone win today. Maybe it’s your little brother playing Monopoly; maybe it’s letting your wife/girlfriend/friend win an argument. Maybe you don’t press so hard for that promotion; just for today you let someone else take that fight while you take a break. Be gracious about it. Winning isn’t everything.