Competitiveness

I've been playing tennis once a week with a friend of mine for a month or two now. Mostly every Tuesday morning, just before work. I've gone to a number of tennis courses when I was younger and the reason why I stopped it was because I tend to be fairly competitive in whatever I do (or did, when I was younger) and sports just stopped being fun when all you aimed at was victory and anything less caused great upset.

Anyway, since then I've grown up a bit. At least I think I have. These days I can actually enjoy a variety of sports without being obsessed with winning. But the interesting thing is that when we play tennis, the warming up by hitting balls around a bit is pretty much useless. I just can't seem to get the ball over the net or when I do, to get it to stay in. And the same thing applies to my friend, as far as I can tell. But as soon as we stop warming up and start counting points, the game improves immensely. All of a sudden we're able to keep the ball alive a lot longer and have long rallies. At least for me this is mostly because of my competitiveness trying to gain control again; defeat is unacceptable.

So in a way, if tennis is an analogy for life, it would appear that trying to subdue my competitiveness just holds me back and makes my life that much more miserable and brings failures along with it. If this is indeed the case, then perhaps instead of just trying to be nice to everyone and striving for some obscure ethical goals I should be focusing more on actually getting results and going after the things that really matter to me. Dunno, just an idea.

On a related note, I stumbled on a review of DeRossitt's The Rules of Ruthlessness online today and that may be precisely the book I should look into next.