“Compete like hell.” -Michael Jordan
“I have a competition in me.”- Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood
The best athlete
wants his opponent at his best.
The best general
enters the mind of his enemy.
The best businessman
serves the communal good.
The best leader
follows the will of the people. All of them embody
the virtue of non-competition.
Not that they don’t love to compete,
but they do it in the spirit of play.
In this they are like children
and in harmony with the Tao. -“Tao Te Ching” by Lao-Tzu (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
“When people are placed in positions slightly above what they expect, they are apt to excel.” -Richard Branson
“Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” -John Wooden
If you truly love something, you want to give it your very best.
Having a worthy competitor (or as The Tao Te Ching would call “an opponent’) enables this. Besides being exciting and energizing, the sense of competition tests you and forces you to go to places you didn’t think you were capable of.
While I’m not advocating a maniacal sense of competition like Daniel Plainview had, I do believe that there’s a lot of good that comes from healthy competition. Sports is an obvious one, but art too is abundant with examples where competition brings out the very best. Think of fun rivalries like the Beach Boys and The Beatles or Hemingway and Fitzgerald or Matisse and Picasso. (On a personal level, I strive to find roles that initially scare the crap out of me. And to work with other actors and artists I respect and admire. Who are intimidatingly great. Who will force me to bring my “A” game to every rehearsal and then to every single performance.)
In his masterpiece, The Inner Game Of Tennis, the author Timothy Gallwey devotes an entire chapter to competition. He talks extensively about his struggles as a young tennis pro, dealing with the pressures (most of which were self imposed) of winning. He walked away from the game entirely.
Later on however, he made a breakthrough when thinking about surfing and trying to catch the biggest wave. He realized that competition was a great thing. He had just thought about it all wrong. Competition wasn’t about indulging the ego or winning trophies or having status or any of that. But rather, it was about love and cooperation. He writes…
“Once one recognizes the value of having difficult obstacles to overcome, it is a simple matter to see the true benefit that can be gained from competitive sports. In tennis who is it that provides a person with the obstacles he needs in order to experience his highest limits? His opponent, of course! Then is your opponent a friend or an enemy? He is a friend to the extent that he does his best to make things difficult for you. Only by playing the role of your enemy does he become your true friend. Only by competing with you does he in fact cooperate! No one wants to stand around on the court waiting for the big wave. In this use of competition it is the duty of your opponent to create the greatest possible difficulties for you, just as it is yours to try to create obstacles for him. Only by doing this do you give each other the opportunity to find out to what heights each can rise.
So I arrived at the startling conclusion that true competition is identical with true cooperation. Each player tries his hardest to defeat the other, but in this use of competition it isn’t the other person we are defeating; it is simply a matter of overcoming the obstacles he presents. In true competition no person is defeated. Both players benefit by their efforts to overcome the obstacles presented by the other. Like two bulls butting their heads against one another, both grow stronger and each participates in the development of the other.”
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