Competition can bring out the best but also gives room to bring out the worst. Competition pushes boundaries, continually progressing our medical and technology forward. We see in athletic competition, people doing things we’ve never seen before, faced against adversity and challenges. Competition funnels the best doctors to the top, to the best schools, best hospitals and most difficult cases.
But competition can also bring out the worst, cutthroat, win-at-all-costs mentality, toxic competitiveness, cheating, playing the political angle instead of doing what’s right, a separation of the “winners” and “losers”, producing the perception and/or reality of an unfair paradigm – the cards are “stacked” against the losers and can never be winners.
Is the answer eliminate competition? Conform people, society, a species to abandon an evolutionary survival instinct. Competition that exists all throughout nature, plants and animals.
I think the answer, the real difficult challenge, is taking part in the competition, but not being defined by the competition. Not being defined by the status of “winner” or “loser” not being driven or motivated by the status but performing the action to be present, engaged and open at what you’re doing, which will only get you better at what you do.
Not being defined by the competition is not being defined by the “wins” and “losses”, you are where you are in the progress of improvement and progression, understanding the wins and losses are just “mile markers”. No one ever went undefeated, ever.