The Ghost of Competition !! Why we compete for even simple things in life?
Do we want to do great in everything we do? Why we need to put efforts in everything we do? The reason may be we compete so much to do things that don’t require us to put that efforts.
we are not going to talk about how to win competition.
“Life for us has become an endless succession of contests.”
-Alfie Kohn
I started writing this topic because everyone wants to talk about success, making money, becoming good and nice person. But do we care about word competition?
There are simple emotions and life events that do not require competition. Just need little bit of time, love and touch of attention.
According to Merriam-Webster literal meaning of competition is :
: the act or process of competing : rivalry: such as
a : the effort of two or more parties acting independently to secure the business of a third party by offering the most favorable terms contractors in competition for the contract to build the new school
b : active demand by two or more organisms or kinds of organisms for some environmental resource in short supply the inter-species competition for food
Let’s break this out
#1 Competition for love : The first thing comes to our mind when we put together two words LOVE & COMPETITION. Love is in short supply is it true if definition of competition to be considered.
If we start form childhood there is a competition between the siblings for their parent’s love. Each one consider that their parents loves the other one more. So they started competing each other for gaining attention and love of their parents.
Same things happens when we are in love and suddenly find out there is someone whom we need to compete with in aspect of being nicer, wiser and being good at everything.
The thing to understand here is that we should be good in identifying competition about the basic human emotions i.e LOVE . We need to know if we are a part of competition or the part of resource. This will help to keep our emotion in separate boxes and do not antagonizes the love for rest of our life.
#2 Competition for Education : The same questions applied here too if we add two words EDUCATION & COMPETITION. Sad thing is that this is as common , as apparent as anything we can think. Even competition is monster here.
In every corner of world the admission to top schools, universities and institutions require to compete in entrance or scholarship exams. Some students have made through it but some do not. This become nightmare for those who do not made it. And started to create identity around it. It creates questions about their intelligence, thinking skills or may be something in which that are being compared.
The Points to understand here is that :
- Even though only 0.5% to 1% students are selected then it does not implied that others are not good. Its totally wrong interpretation every successful entrepreneur, scientist or Nobel prize winner from top universities or schools.
- May be we are competing for wrong thing or in the wrong competition. This only can be understood by trying other options too.
- Education is a resource that is in abundance for all and that keeps our civilization evolving both intellectually or socially.
#3 Competition for Money: When love and education has competition then how we can think of no competition for most important and interesting part of existence is money.
Every job started with saying bring that competition down. Competitions is considered a war out there. So as we need to compete with our colleagues in everything happens around. Compete for working more, hard and longest. How is it good to be forked in competition everyday for 10 hours for next 30 years .
This is where we know we are in deep competition and had to chose our way.
Keep thinking
We have discussed the competition in three important aspect of our life which are more of internal aspects than external ones. Competition itself has both advantages or disadvantages but we tried to understand where we started to have feeling of competition and do we realized that we are in a competition.
Right from childhood we are taught to get marks in school for winning the competition to get into top universities, once we are in a top university we need to compete hard enough to get good job and once we get the job we need to compete enough to earn more. It keeps on going in all aspects of our life and throughout our life.
“The most interesting thing about competition is that every time we thought this is the last competition we need to win.”
We need to learn, identify and manage the competition so that we will be able to harvest only positives, goods and advantages of competition.
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