Bad behavior

I was originally going to make this a pseudo part III to my two previous posts about competition in response to some of the excellent points Josh made in his blog post, but as the gears began to turn in my brain I realized there was more that I wanted to say.

Josh brings up the excellent point that competition and cooperation, like all things, should be used in the correct context. This has become one of my favorite life lessons - "Tools, not rules." (right up there with "try doing it harder.")

I spent a long time in my previous posts talking about social equity, fair play, and decrying some elements of our "win at all costs" culture. But, context is extremely important. I'm quite certain that my friends in the military have very little interest in fair fights. We can all agree that violence, killing, and warfare are terrible things - but if we must engage in them we want to keep it as one-sided as possible.

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If you've ever trained with me or taken any of my classes, odds are good that you've heard me make an anti-violence speech. Regular readers will remember my death aesthetic post. I'm the guy who puts kittens on advertisements for Fifth Ape seminars.

Yet a sizeable part of my training curriculum involves very direct methods for causing overwhelming damage to another human being.

On top of that, I teach dirty fighting. Everything from simple misdirection to flat out nasty tricks. It's many a bout that ends with my opponent (half jokingly) accusing me of cheating.

What's more, other aspects of my training involve to greater or lesser degrees; silence, stealth, sneaking, skulking, and other generally questionable behavior. Throw in healthy doses of authority-questioning, anti-establishmentism, and minor civil disobedience. A friend once referred to Fifth Ape as "Colin's Finishing School for Cat-Burglary."

And I teach this to kids.

Here's why.

I deeply value self control. From a purely physical perspective, while maximum strength and power is important, I think control is even more important.  I care less about how far you can jump and more about whether you can land precisely where you mean to every single time. I care about somatic awareness - your  basic control over the muscles in your body. I care about mindfulness in movement.

How is this control developed? Simple - use your body. Develop gross movement patterns and strength, then practice until you have fine motor control.  Use and Practice are key. With any new physical skill, muscles and movement are spastic and binary in the beginning, then smooth out with continued work. Eventually, an intuitive understanding is developed and the skill is mastered.

Understanding leads to control. I teach people fighting so they understand it. The more time they spend practicing, the more they learn to regulate and control their emotions - more specifically fear, anger, and aggression (which are all fear wearing different hats). Unexplored emotions are like unused muscles - spastic and binary. Off or on. With mindful practice, awareness increases and emotional control is gained. Dealing with dirty tricks teaches adaptability and calm focus. My goal is not to turn people into world class fighters - rather it's to make them invulnerable to emotional manipulation.

The same principle applies to all Fifth Ape training. Learning tricks teaches recognition. In short, you can't trick a trickster. Silence and stealth teach subtlety - a key to lateral thinking. The anti-establishmentism teaches questioning of the status quo - which is the first step to innovation and changing the world.

Mastery of these skills leads to an appreciation of context. It may be that 99.9% of the time we are morally bound to tell the truth. But, every so often, telling a lie is the most moral thing to do. Only a person who has fully and deeply explored his or her emotional landscape will be able to know when that moment arrives.

Competition, part II

Many of you responded beautifully to part I of my competition rant. I confess to taking a strongly argumentative tone in the hopes of drawing out some good comments - and it worked!

...in fact, it might have worked a little too well as many of the points I was going to make have now already been made. Mostly by my sister. She's a smart lady - beneath that sweet upstate New York mommy exterior lurks an adimantium mind of complex machinations and fearsome logic. There's also a surprising amount of cake recipes in there. Imagine having to follow her act in school for 12 years and you'll quickly understand why I don't like to compete very much :)

So, let's talk about the positive side of competition.

Competition is the great motivator. Nothing provides the clarity and focus of a good competition. Nothing can inspire an epic performance like a contest. We should all be so lucky as to have at least one great rivalry in our life - we've all probably heard variations of the saying "The best thing in life is an honorable friend. The second best thing is an honorable enemy."

To the five people who understand this reference: I love you.And in this way I am just as competitive as everyone else. In fact, maybe more. I love a good contest more than just about anything. Back in Los Angeles, I lived for the morning hours I spent training grappling. I rolled hard with everyone in there - felt the rush of winning a match, the disappointment of losing one. I remember in stunning detail many individual contests.

For the life of me, I can't tell you my win-loss record.

Our coach created a group and an atmosphere where hard work, maximum effort, full commitment, and progress were valued. Rankings were not. We all tried like hell to beat each other. As soon as a match was over, in an unspoken agreement, the record got reset to 0-0.

It's only now, years later, that I realize how incredible that was.

I've been to a few other martial arts schools/groups over the years and I've been disappointed by constantly running up against a darker shade of competition. Rigid hierarchies. People hoarding knowledge to maintain an advantage. Teachers scared to roll with their students for fear of losing face if they're tapped out.

This is part of the "winning" culture I wrote about last time. This type of behavior leads to MBAs stabbing each other in the back to get a coveted job interview. Medical students sabotaging each other to be top of their class. It leads to Enron.

But, done right, it leads to the 1980 Miracle on Ice. It leads to the Apollo program. It leads to Calculus (actually there was plenty of nastiness in that particular competition... shades of grey, folks) And, as my sister mentioned, it leads to a majority of kids involved with youth sports learning how to play fair, win respectfully, and lose gracefully.

"So," I hear you saying, "you're arguing that competition can be good or bad. That's really profound, Colin. My cat could have told me that."

To which I respond, "...you have a talking cat??!?"

I think there are some key issues here. First, we need to tie winning to a larger social gain. When one of my original grappling group worked hard and got better it forced all of us to improve. At Crossfit Durham (another bastion of incredible people and friendly competition) when we see Phil snatch his bodyweight it pushes all of us to work like crazy on our snatch... not to sneak out to the parking lot and cut his brake lines. The success of Google sparked a wave of innovative web based services that's made our lives better.

Second, we need to think carefully about our exaltation of elites. With enough success, some individuals think they are entitled to different treatment and held to different standards. And we let them. Think of all the bad behavior we see out of some of our star athletes. Think about the unregulated and systemic hubris of Wall Street... then look around at the mess we're all still in thanks to their blind pursuit of personal gains. We should celebrate the achievements of inspiring individuals, but hold them to the same standards as everyone else - reset the score to 0-0, if you will.

Utopian? Sure. We'll never fully eliminate the darker sides of competition. But I think we can shift the conversation. Ultimately, we should all care about building a better world, expanding our knowledge, and mastering ourselves. Competition and cooperation are both needed - as is perspective and a society that rewards the best in us.

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?