All my life I have believed that I am a non-competitive person. I think it all started when I was about 9 years old on a t-ball team. I was an active young child and I thought that I’d try some kind of sport. I knew someone who played t-ball and he seemed to enjoy it so I thought I’d try. My experience was not a pleasant one. I still remember my first turn to bat. I had been looking forward to it for a long time and I felt like I was the last kid to get a turn. I don’t remember exactly what the coach said but in my sensitive little brain it translated into, “if you miss, you’ll be a failure and you will disappoint everyone!” All the parents were watching and yelling. The pressure was too much and I couldn’t stop thinking about how badly everyone would feel if I missed. I don’t remember exactly what happened but I remember that feeling of letting everyone down.
Eventually I ended up playing little league baseball and I got a good coach who emphasized the fun of the sport and doing your best without pressure to win. It was exactly what I needed and I had a good experience that year. Eventually, I tried basketball which was the “cool” thing to do when I was in middle school and because I am tall and thin, everyone just expected me to play. I was not great in basketball and I could have gotten better but I just hated how intense other people got while playing. I hated that feeling of never being good enough. In high school I tried soccer and had about the same experience. Finally, I decided that I just wasn’t competitive enough and gave up on traditional sports for good.
Throughout my childhood, I had enjoyed snowboarding even though I hadn’t ever really tried it at a ski resort. I started standing up on my sled before I even knew that snowboarding was a real thing! Eventually I got a real snowboard and when in high school I got a season pass at the local ski resort. Again, I was not excellent at snowboarding but for my limited experience, I was actually pretty good. However, this time, I didn’t have anyone who was disappointed in my performance. In fact, my other snowboarding friends were very encouraging. Even the older guys that were really good at it. I kept at it and before long I was excelling. I never entered any formal competitions but my friends and I would often issue silly challenges to each other and were always trying to beat each other at something. The scenario was the same with many of the other alternative sports I tried.
I was having fun and improving my skills so I didn’t realize that I was actually being competitive in those sports. Now that I’m older and I look back on my life, I realize that I was motivated by competition more often than I would have confessed. I have found that there are two major differences.
Improvement vs Domination
Obviously, any competition is driven by the desire to achieve a victory. If there is no chance of victory then there is no competition. However, in my experiences with organized sports, the emphasis was usually placed on beating the other team rather than improving as a whole. I witnessed so many hateful and hurtful words in organized sports. I have to say that there are many who have the ability to overcome this attitude and focus on improvement. In contrast, I was watching the BMX competition in the X Games as a youth. There was one rider who had performed so well that everyone expected him to win. The last rider was the underdog who had quietly worked his way up over the years. He came out and surprised everyone with a performance that was astounding! It looked as if he was going to beat out the expected victor and take the whole competition. There was just one problem. As he came down on a ramp his bike malfunctioned and he crashed. The result was that his bike was rendered unusable. The rules were that a rider had a few minutes to either fix his bike or find a replacement. There was no way his bike could be fixed in that sort of time. He was about to give up the whole game. He climbed off the track with look on his face that was obviously discouraged but happy that he had done so well. What happened next was the last thing you would have expected. The lead rider that everyone thought would win ran and retrieved his bike, and took it to his rival as quickly as he could. The riders didn’t spend a second conversing but the underdog took his rival’s bike and was able to finish the competition. It was a close competition. In the end, the underdog didn’t beat his rival but gave him a run for his money! At the end of the ride, he took the bike back and they exchanged a simple high five that meant, “you did great man!” They obviously wanted to win, but their passion was the sport and their progress in it, not the glory of winning.
Natural vs Contrived
The other factor for me is that the competition in organized sports was contrived. It didn’t happen naturally. I was told exactly who the competition was and was expected to treat the opponent as an enemy. I’m a friendly guy by nature and would often smile at the other players and talk to them but that tendency was quickly squashed by my teammates and coach. Their words were always something like, “focus on the game!” but between the lines they were saying, “friendliness is a weakness and you don’t want to show the enemy your weakness!” In reality, the toughest competition is the one who has the most traits in common. I have seen this in business. Natural competitors are really in the same realm and are usually pushing for the same common goal. If we acknowledge that fact then competition suddenly becomes a tool to drive a common goal forward like nothing else can.
My best physical achievements have happened within a group of people who I know want to see me improve, but are in a state of friendly competition with me. It drives us (especially the male psyche) to put just a little more effort and passion into achieving your goals. Because of this, practicing physical goals with other like minded people will fuel progress. I am competitive by nature (it is still weird for me to say that) and I am coming to embrace that fact because I know how much good it can do.