Competitiveness

We've all engaged in competitions from time to time, some of us more often than others. Some people enjoy competing and some shun it entirely. Usually the first forms of competitive behavior appear very early on as children. The competitive aspect might be argued to be one where the child feels that it has to compete for the attention of an adult. And then comes football (no, not the vulgar American version, but proper European football). And ice hockey. And golf. And school. And work. And so on. To say that I'm a competitive person would be worthy of an Understatement of the Year award.

Competitive situations, however, get out the bad things in me. In fact, that is one reason why I stopped actively engaging in sports competitions: winning wasn't everything, it was the only thing. Anything beside the first place was a disappointment and I was a very bad loser. So eventually I found the error of my ways and decided that competing is just silly and that I should just steer clear of such situations.

Recently I've taken a slight u-turn again and I've been thinking of where this non-competitive path has been leading me. In fact, even though I've been saying constantly that I'm not competing with anyone or anything, that's not entirely true. On some subconscious level I just couldn't turn the mode off. But, that might not actually be such a bad thing after all. I think that instead of treating competitions as something inherently bad, the problem was indeed with me and how I handled victories and defeats.

A life without competition is in fact terribly boring. Competitions don't even necessarily have to always be against other people. You can compete against yourself, also. Identify and push your own limits. Ayrton Senna has been quoted as saying (to paraphrase a bit) that every day a person should explore their limits and boundaries and push them a bit further, ever so slightly past the breaking point. It is this which in turn allows a person to achieve continuous development, an evolution of sorts. Some clever bloke could, for instance, tie this view to Nietzsche's teachings or alternatively to the views of growth by subjecting oneself to situations outside of one's comfort zone.

So in light of this, competitions are not only fun, but they're very useful. Granted, if competition is overdone, it might have some negative side-effects to it. But then again, overdoing anything is often bad. My fear is, however, that if one continues to avoid competitions, the end result is that of boring mediocrity. Of course different people perceive this topic differently, but I just have this feeling that either people who are able to elevate themselves above competitions are very smart or then they are very dumb. Maybe some day I'll figure out which. But in the mean time I just got my ticket to the Helsinki City Run, a half-marathon that is taking place next weekend. That's a new frontier for me in which I can push my own limits and at the same time see how I fare against a friend of mine, who has apparently been ever so slightly (*cough*) more active in training for the event. So if I lose, and I most likely will, then it just goes to show that I've neglected the proper training routine and that I'm worse at running half-marathons than my friend is. But fortunately the positive thing about losing is that it is always very annoying, and the trick is to not make a habit out of it...