Competition, part I

Over the past few months I've had a few variations of the same conversation:

Friend: "Hey Colin - are you competing in the Carolina Fitness Challenge/Gladiator 5k/Crossfit Games Open WODs/etc.  ??"

Me: "Nope."

Friend: "Why not? You'd do well!"

Me: "I don't like competition."

Friend: "Why not?"

...and this is where I usually try to come up with a snappy one sentence answer and fail miserably. Let's see if I can do better now.

Let's tackle the easy reason first. As a person who is interested in health, fitness, and vitality I don't like sports. Rather, I don't like sports as we think of them around most of the world. Does that sound strange?

Sports are all movement specializations. Engage in too much specialization and you upset the intricate balance of the human body. You get injured. Seriously injured. This isn't just the pro running back who blows out his ACL after a rough tackle. It's the young gymnast who's had a shoulder operation and two knee surgeries by the time she's 14. Increasingly, young athletes are encouraged to specialize in one sport rather than play a wide selection. We'll talk more about that later, but one of the results is a dramatically higher rate of serious "career ending" injuries in kids.

Sports encourage us to think of ourselves as Basketball Players, Soccer Players, Divers, Crossfitters, etc. How limiting. You are a human being - you contain multitudes. Explore the vast diversity of movement. Play.

Now on to the trickier reason. The standard argument for engaging in competition is that it's "how the world works." Learning how to compete will instill the values needed to "win."

Bullshit.

There have been many many books written on this subject but for the sake of brevity I'll oversimplify. "Success" in this globalized world depends on creativity and innovation - great ideas put into action. Great ideas are not, contrary to popular opinion, generated by a lone genius. They're created by collaborations. Group learning. Cooperation, not competition.

Of course, it's more complicated than that. A great group collaboration will lead to innovation, but throw a few more groups in the mix and you'll get even more innovation. The competition provides motivation.

Now would be a good time to talk about incentives.

One of the great Truths of life is, "You get the behavior you incentivize, not necessarily the behavior you want."

If we as a culture incentivize just "winning" - winning divorced from any larger societal/cultural gain - then we get a culture that "wins" at all costs, solely for personal gain. At best, we look for any and all means to cut corners. At worst, we cheat.

We dope our athletes, pay them vast sums of money, then wonder why we have a doping problem in college and high-school athletes. We mow down the rainforest to plant huge monocultures of soybeans because it provides a good ROI. We build factories in India because there aren't any pesky environmental or safety regulations we need to spend money on... consequences be damned.

If, however, we tie together winning with a larger social/cultural gain we see something different. We stop trying to win for the sake of winning or for personal gain and instead focus on meaningful contribution to a body of knowledge. For expedience and for lack of a better term, let's call this "friendly competition." We still pursue prestige and recognition, but its tied to something real.

Think about the development of breakdancing, or parkour. Disparate groups of people around the world. No standardized body of knowledge, no official schools or coaches. But, via the internet, there was a platform to showcase skills and moves. One group watches the video of another group, learns the skills shown, then adds their own unique elements and posts their own video. Rinse and repeat - and just a few years later there is an incredibly diverse and skilled global community. Driven in part by competition, but friendly competition... which looks a lot like collaboration when you think about it.

There are many other examples from big and organized, like the X-prize, to small niches, like the growth of the Starcraft community. Prestige comes from adding something real and tangible to the society.

So why the hell do we largely "train" for competition by engaging in activities that revolve around arbitrary rules, scoring points, finite games that end with a celebrated "winner" and forgotten "loser" - but add nothing to society? That put our bodies at risk via constant repetition of highly specialized movement patterns? That promote and celebrate "star" players but ignore those who "don't make the cut?"

Wouldn't it be better to focus on a true group effort that had meaning? Form a Habitat for Humanity team and challenge them to build a house or two for those in need? Think of all the group problem solving. Think of the lasting good.

So maybe it's fair to say that it's not competition I don't like. It's how we define winning and losing. As the wise philosopher Wallace once said, "Don't hate the playa, hate the game."

I'm presenting this as a black and white issue to make a point, but of course there are endless shades of grey. We'll dive into those next time... until then, let me know what you think about all of this?