Competition that catalyst for greatness: how healthy competition can help anyone achieve their goals.

Hello again, dear reader. In our last conversation we pontificated on the subject of how to be successful with a "side hustle." As we have recently been talking about time management and how to get the most out of the day, as well as the most out of life, however as begin thinking about moonlighting, otherwise known as the "side hustle" I began thinking about the importance of competition. I started thinking about the fact that no matter what side hustles someone chooses to use weather is driving for a rideshare Company or writing books or articles for making jewelry or anything else that one can think of is more than likely that you are going to enter into a niche that already has a significant number of participants, which means there is going to be competition for business. At this point I started thinking about the benefits of competition, and how it can inspire and foster creativity and a superior work ethic. So for today's conversation, dear reader, we are going to discuss the benefits of healthy competition. Hopefully by the end of the conversation, you will be striving to do your best at whatever it is that you choose to do...

“Contest is a part of human life everywhere that human life is found. In war and in games, in work and in play, physically, intellectually, and morally, human beings match themselves with or against one another. Struggle appears inseparable from human life, and contest is a particular focus or mode of interpersonal struggle, an opposition that can be hostile but need not be, for certain kinds of contest may serve to sublimate and dissolve hostilities and to build friendship and cooperation.

Contest is one kind of adversativeness, if we understand adversativeness in the ordinary large sense of a relationship in which beings are set against or act against one another. Adversative action, action against, can be destructive, but often it is supportive. If our feet press against the surface we walk on and it does not resist the pressure, we are lost. We have all suffered from dreams in which we feel ourselves plummeting through space. Such dreams can be terrifying, for bodily existence is such that it requires some kind of againstness. Gravity is reassuring; it establishes fields where advertisativeness can work and where it functions as a central element in all physical existence.

But adversativeness is significant beyond the physical. It has provided a paradigm for understanding our own existence: in order to know myself, I must know that something else is not me and is (in some measure) set against me, psychologically as well as physically.”

–Walter J. Ong, Fighting for Life

From the dawn of time, the world has been marked by conflict, struggle, and opposition. This is true in nature, where day continually butts into night; the ocean collides with the shore; and predators chase in human civilization, especially amongst its male members.

For reasons of reproduction and testosterone, men are generally more aggressive, risk-taking, and competitive than women. For thousands of years, men have engaged each other in tests of strength, skill, and cleverness in order to protect their tribe from outsiders, and to prove their manhood and gain status amongst insiders. With status came access to females and other resources, as well as glory and renown.

In primitive times, these contests took the form of physical brawls and battles, but for centuries they have extended into a wide array of realms: art, rhetoric, logic, politics, philosophy, science, and more. If men can compete in it, they will.

These competitions by their nature produced both winners and losers, and sometimes incurred collateral damage. But the drive of each party to be the best and rise to the top also drove societal progress; out of the sparks of collision, from the blood, sweat, and tears of contest, emerged new ideas, technologies, and ways of being in the world.

In the modern day, however, these so-called “pissing contests” between men have gotten a bad name. The male competitive drive has been blamed for wars, economic meltdowns, and political gridlock. And the entire ethos of competition increasingly finds itself at odds with the values of modern culture. Competitions are exclusive, rather than inclusive, separate people into winners and losers, and don’t distribute rewards equally. Having a keen competitive drive is seen as the purview of the domineering and insecure — while the “authentic” are above it all and operate only from self-motivation and the desire to be their very best selves.

For this reason, social commentators and policy makers have tried to figure out ways to make men more cooperative and nurturing, and have sought to remove competition from institutions like schools, believing this transformation will benefit individuals and society as a whole.

But the effort is ultimately an unwise exercise in futility. Men are hardwired to compete. And even if we could somehow kill the male competitive drive, we’d be doing a great disservice to ourselves. Male competition may carry some pitfalls for civilization, but it’s also what made civilization in the first place.

The Benefits of Competition

“A thing without opposition ipso facto does not exist.” –Charles Sanders Pierce

It’s true that competition is not an unalloyed good; when participants adopt a win-at-all-costs mindset and go outside the rules, they can harm their opponents, as well as society as a whole. And while competition can bring out the best in some people, its pressure can also cause others to anxiously flounder.

But competition, when engaged in by those who keep a healthy mindset and embrace fair play, can be an enormously powerful force for good and has a number of important benefits.

In Part I, we will examine each of these vitalizing benefits in turn.

Competition Makes Us Better

There has been a lot of talk in the past few years about deliberate practice as the key to mastering any skill, and with good reason. Research from psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and others has shown that effortful, deliberate practice is an important element in gaining mastery in any domain.

Nevertheless, it’s just one element.

Competition is another. In fact, you might call it the original performance-enhancing drug.

The first psychologist to uncover the effect of competition on performance was Norman Triplett. Back in 1898, Triplett noticed that cyclists tended to have faster times when they were riding in the presence of another person as opposed to riding alone. To test this phenomenon in the lab, he created a “Competition Machine” — a game where you had to reel in a line of silk cord as quickly as you could.

Triplett had a group of children spin his Competition Machine two times: one time alone and one time against another competitor. Triplett’s theory about people performing better when in competition was verified: 50% of the children reeled the cord faster when faced with a competitor compared to when they were alone. About 25% of the children achieved the same time whether they were alone or competing, and another 25% had worse times when they were competing than when they were alone. (We’ll explore why some people may not be affected or perform worse during competition, and how the latter can overcome that effect later on.)

Researchers who followed Triplett built upon his initial research using more sophisticated experiments.

For example, in a 2012 study cyclists were asked several times to pedal as fast as they possibly could for 2,000 meters on a stationary bike, in order to establish their baseline “personal record.” They were then put in front of a screen that projected their avatar, along with an avatar they were told was of a competitor they were racing against, who was obscured behind a partition in the room. In fact, the “competitor” was simply an avatar set to go at the participant’s own best time.

And yet, despite the fact the participants were sure they could go no faster than they had during the trial cycles, once engaged in the heat of competition, 12 of 14 were able to beat their previous records.

In another study, recreational weightlifters were able to bench press more weight when competing against others than when practicing by themselves, and the effect was even greater when they competed in front of an audience.

The effort-enhancing benefits of competition extend beyond the world of sport as well. Studies have shown that competition in classrooms motivates children (especially boys) to engage boring tasks, while other research has demonstrated that competitive culture in some workplaces makes employees more committed to their job, and more apt to go the extra mile in their role.

These studies that have been going on for over a century merely confirm what most of us already knew intuitively: Competition can make us better.

Why is that?

Well, the downside of competition — greater stress — is also its upside. While chronic stress is bad for your health, and over-anxiety can indeed cause you to choke, the occasional stress response, if positively embraced, can prime you for greater performance.

Knowing that we’re competing with someone sets off a cascade of hormonal and neurochemical changes in our bodies and brains that prepare us for peak performance.

Knowing that we’re competing with someone sets off a cascade of hormonal and neurochemical changes in our bodies and brains that prepare us for peak performance. Under ordinary circumstances, your brain is very stingy in releasing physiological resources; it will tell you you’re fatigued long before your body will actually become physically exhausted.

But when you’re competing, your brain goes into fight-or-flight mode and becomes more generous in doling out the physiological resources you need to face the “threat.” Your heart rate increases, your testosterone goes up (which increases your drive for success), cortisol is released (which boosts your alertness), and you feel like you have more energy to burn. Your brain also gets very motivated by its chance to increase your status, and releases dopamine, which drives you towards a reward.

These physiological, and consequently, psychological changes allow us to dig deep and push ourselves past our preconceived limits. You don’t get this effect when you’re practicing by yourself or even with your friends, because there’s nothing truly at stake.

It’s important to keep in mind that you don’t even have to win to get these benefits. During the 2008 men’s Olympic swimming relay, in which the Americans won in dramatic fashion, the four teams that lost still finished ahead of the world record time. While they didn’t win the race, they improved simply by taking part in a close, intense competition.

Besides providing a performance boost, competition also helps us improve by providing an external source to measure ourselves against. Competitors can reveal flaws and weaknesses in ourselves we didn’t know we had. If we lose, we can take that feedback back to our practice and work on it so that we can do better next time.

Thus, while people often say the best kind of competition is striving to beat ourselves, if we truly want to find another gear, we need to compete against others.

As always, dear reader, thanks for listening, and there will be more to come soon.