Competition

Today I want to take a look at something that shows up in life all over the place. It shows up in business, in schools, in sports, literally everywhere. In nearly all facets of life there is competition. Whoever makes the most sales gets the promotion. Whoever does the best on a test gets to be the front of the line when going out for recess. Whoever scores the most points gets the better contract.

Regardless of what the venue, we tend to reward those who prove themselves to be better than everyone else. What about second best? What about all the people who honestly put in their all but did not quite make the cut. They all get left by the wayside. Nobody seems to care about them. This method creates a very cutthroat environment where there is no  real reason for teamwork.
 How are we supposed to create win-win circumstances in life with all this competition everywhere?

The simple answer is, you can't. It is not doable. All you can really do is decide not to compete. Competition comes down to judging one person as better than another. And it gets carried to ridiculous extremes with the first place guy or team often putting down others. But the thing about competition is that it always comes down to using very specific criterion to do the measuring of who is best at what. If the criterion changes who is better changes dramatically.

So what to do? Don't play the game. Decide that your life will be played by different rules and that winning is determined by what percentage of your possible effort you put into each thing that you do. Decide for yourself that you are always going to do your best. Commit to giving your all in everything that you do. Do not look at what others have done or are capable of doing. Regardless of how you measure up against other people, if you are doing your best, there is never any reason for you to be upset with your results. You may even find that putting all your energy into trying to be as good as someone else has been holding you back from obtaining your true potential.

In business, do not think that you need to make advertising campaigns and slogans to take business away from others who may be in your same marketing niche. You do not need to tear others down or make claims about being better than the other guy. Do not worry that other people produce more than you or sell more than you or that it takes them less time. Do not compare your product(s) to that of anyone else. If you are doing your all, no comparison needs to be made.

Your product(s) and efforts will speak for themselves. And pretty much regardless of what your market is, there are enough people out there in the world today such that if all you ever obtained were new customers that would still be enough to make you wealthy.  Focus on putting out the best quality product that you can as efficiently as you can and you will be successful. And ultimately does it really matter who is number one as long as we can all be successful?