Some of us non-competitive folks are just motivated a little differently. I tend to be goal-directed. I decide what I want to accomplish, and go for it. But the thing I want to accomplish is usually something like getting a college degree, or finishing a project- not something where it matters if I’m better than someone else or not. The important thing is whether or not I (and anyone I might be working with) achieve the goal, not whether anyone else is doing better than me or not.
Excellent thread.
I am uncompetitive because I am indifferent to the outcomes of most contests in a civilized context. Competitive success in the business world is orthogonal to my psychological well-being, as is victory in athletics or other such competitive endeavors. I don’t need the stimulation, I don’t need the recognition, and unless I am starving, I don’t need the cash.
Self-improvement, on the other hand, is of critical importance to me. I measure self-improvement by self-mastery and emotional balance. Contrary to Happy Scrappy, I find “losing pretty” to be a much more satisfying exercise than either winning well or winning badly. When I lose with poise and indifference, I have mastered myself. I am uninterested in victory over others until my contest with myself is won.
To that end, I train as hard as I can. I fence, kickbox, dance, and shoot recurve bows. Winning a bout or scoring a bullseye are less important to me than internalizing the forms that all of these activities engender. When I have done these things to my satisfaction, I may not win but I will never lose.
But like Happy Scrappy, I am never satisfied with the status quo. I am perpetually restless: I can always be reading, practicing, training, etc. I hope to overcome this restlessness not by competitive victory but by indifference even to myself.
Long way to go until that, alas.
I don’t really know if I’m competitive. I asked myself this very question in the spring, when I participated in a string of speech contests (I won my Toastmasters club’s contest, which led to the Area contest where I won again, which led to the Division contest … where I placed 2nd). And now you’re thinking “well you participated in a contest, so you must be competitive, right?” But the thing is that while I don’t mind competing, and of course I’m happy when I win (and I always try to win), I genuinely don’t particularly care whether I win. I competed the first time because otherwise my club wouldn’t have had a contest at all, and competed the other times because I happened to win.
I have the same attitude toward sports: I love to play softball, and I will always do my best and hope that my team wins, but I’m mostly in it for the fun. I’ve been on a moderately good team and I’ve been on a team that only won games by forfeit, and each experience was its own kind of fun.
Ditto with work and grad school: I’m not highly motivated to compete, but I also don’t shy away from competition and once I’m in a competitive situation I give it my all. If I don’t come out on top, life goes on. I consider myself neither a “winner” nor a “loser.”
The one area where I refuse to compete is romance: I agree with Hello Again’s “bullshit mindgame” terminology, and I also think that romantic competition is pointless. If he wants to be with someone else, he will!
My singing (and overall musical ability) is probably my ego’s biggest weakness, but I’m only moderately competitive about it.
What do y’all think: could I call myself “competitive?”
I don’t know how much stock I put in a 9-question quiz, but I scored 23 out of 100 points:
A Buddhist. Heh.
So I guess I’m not competitive. But two more points and I’d be a “player.” 
I do not enjoy competition unless I am a member of a team. Competing as an individual makes me nervous and depressed. I will seize any opportunity to create a team, even if it’s just a friendly alliance between myself and one other person. Once I’m no longer a solo player, I can compete quite aggressively, and enjoy doing so, but if it’s just me, my heart isn’t in it.
I am if anything anticompetitive. I think of competition as all right for companies and teams, but for individuals, I feel it goes against some basic human needs. If you have to compete to have enough to eat, to have a place to sleep, to find a friend or a lover, to have the right to call yourself a human being at all, then the marketplace, or maybe some morer primal instinct than that, has replaced something in our souls.
As a woman, you have that prerogative. As a man, the less competitive I am, the less of a man I am, and the less fit I am as a potential partner.
I’m in the unenviable position of knowing the mindgame is bullshit, but havijng to play anyway.
morer
havijng
You know what I mean.
This is a very interesting thread.
I would take a balanced approach to competing. There are situations where the context is not appropriate for a real slugfest. At a funeral, for instance. I remember we were at one for a deceased relative, and we all got together to shoot some hoops in the backyard. One guy got so frustrated when his “team” lost, he walked out semi-teared. I think that’s where you are really going overboard - when you can’t distinguish genuine competition from a “friendly” game.
But then my philosophy vis-a-vis competition and winning is slightly different to the populist view. I compete to win, full stop end of story. If I didn’t, what in the heck is the point of competition? I mean geniune competition BTW, not that horseshit where you pick on someone who is so obviously out-of-your-league (whether much better or worse than you). BC when you do that, you effectively give yourself an excuse. “Oh it doesn’t matter that he won, he was sooooooooooo much better than me” or “oh, I know I’m too good to be true”.
I mean someone who is (roughly) the equivalent of your abilities in whatever you are competing in. That’s real competition. Coz it could go either way. You win, or you lose. It’ll be a test of your true complete self. Mental. Physical. Stress response. Close calls. Handling/managing the Luck Factor. Everything. No excuses (if you’re a true competer). Otherwise it’s just not competition. If I beat everyone by 100 miles, how the heck is that meant to make me feel so good? Where’s the challenge? Who are my competitors?
I think there is some sort of fear of risk-taking going on in people who are very averse to taking competition. Not always, but a lot of the time. How you can usually identify it are people who will definately not compete when the odds of them winning are 50/50. In other words, real competition. Coz they don’t have an excuse. They lose face if they actually lose. And it scares them.
I totally get people saying that winning just isn’t that important to them. In life, we all have different priorities. If someone challenged me to a joust which meant that I would spend less time with my wife, I’d tell 'em to take a hike. Becoz spending time with her is A PRIORITY for me. Competing isn’t.
But I’m not afraid to do it. I’ll just ask that someone for a later date. If they’re serious about REAL COMPETITION, then I’ll ask them to meet me in six months when we’re both highly trained. That’s just the way I think.
But yeah there is that “flip” side of the coin. Some folks who are so competitive they’ve forgotten why the hell they’re doing it in the first place. They wanna excel at everything, and that includes any mundane activity you can think of that most people couldn’t give two shits about. Like taking out the trash. Or cleaning the garage. They just come off as assholes with nothing better in thier lives except the thrill of the hunt. IMO they miss out on a lot of other important stuff.
But then I also really enjoy meeting that type of person. Probably becoz I’m someone who really doesn’t mind rubbing you up the wrong way. I figure if you’re an asshole enough to be one of those above mentioned guys, the more the funnier.
I speak from experience. I remember one guy like this who a group of my friends (including myself) met at a park. He constantly kept challenging us to stuff. He was a long-distance runner of sorts. Anyhoo, we run, and since none of my friends or I are sprinting types, we lose.
So this kid has this look of glee on his face like, I beat you. I know he’s one of those hyper-competitive types that wants to win AT EVERYTHING. So I challenge him to an arm wrestle. He’s short and kinda skinny, and I’m tall and muscular. Straight away it’s obvious where this ones heading. But I do this on purpose, coz I’m the ribbing kind.
He actually refuses, at first. Knowing he’s gonna lose, it makes him feel fear. And it’s pretty obvious from the look on his face how he takes it. So I callz him a chicken shit. “You don’t have the guts to face me” I say, with my friends joining in the act hooting like chickens.
Bear in mind this isn’t about competing either. If it were I would have given him an adequate period of time to train and so forth. It’s just about taking the piss out of someone who takes these things a little too seriously.
So anyhow, we get to it and he loses the first. He starts whining pretty badly immediately about how the weight of the table was shifted towards me, how my legs were supporting the table etc.
OK, so we do it with one hand behind our own respective backs. Round two; he loses again.
Suddenly, his face is going red. We aren’t even ribbing him now, and he starts to go a little KA KA. Complaining about this that and the other (I forget all the list of crap he went on about this time).
So I tell him now that okay, he can use both his hands if he wishes whilst I remain one-armed. Realistically, I’m kidding with him now and taking the piss a little, since I figure he’s too proud to ever take it.
I’m a little surprised that he does. Round three. You guessed it. I win again.
Now he’s jumping off the ground and he starts getting REALLY PISSED. He starts swearing and he actually makes like he’s gonna hit me (feigning with the back of his hand before he comes to his senses and realises I could kick the shit out of him). So he just sprints off… like a bat out of hell ------
And on competing against yourself - that’s not really competing. What you are doing is self-improvement. A worthy goal, to be sure. One that many have made the crux of thier lives, and admirably so, I think.
However this is never TRUE competition, where you are up against your fellow man. Testing each other. Pushing each other. Drama. Excitement. The thrill of victory. The pang of defeat. Luck. Skill. Endurance. Challenge. This is the real stuff boys. And it’s a whole 'nother feeling from Zen-like internalism.
If you want to train and self-improve, read the numbers. If you want to compete, then there’s only one way. And it ain’t by challenging yourself.
Bear in mind that the above I mentioned pertains to sports-related competition. Other stuff I’ll come back 2morw to comment on.
I note the lack of gender-specific language in the first paragraph just above, compared with the red words in the second paragraph.
Do I read you right, then? Self-improvement is gender-neutral, while competition (for good or ill) is essentially manly?
I just figured maybe you were Norwegian.
No, but I’m just as morose and volatile when drunk, which I am now, so just you watch yourself.
Whassamatta, pining for the fjords?
Hello Again, Do you think your attitude towards pursuing your personal best rather than “the win” is because you compete in horse sports? I say that because, since I’ve been competing in hunter/jumpers, I’ve had to work hard to adjust my own mindset away from always going for the win and towards doing my personal best.
Yes, you can say that going for a personal best isn’t really “competing” but “self improvement.” The thing with most horse sports is you have to go to the competitions in order to get good enough to eventually get the win.
I’ll try to explain for those who have no idea what the heck I’m talking about.
A lot of times going to competitions for horse sports is part of the training program. With a green horse, your objective for most initial competitions should be to build the horse’s confidence rather than coming home with a win. A new bike isn’t going to freak out just because it’s in a strange environment. A green horse very well may. So you often go to competitions with the simple objective of getting around safely (so eventually the horse becomes used to it). There’s no sense in trying to win–sometimes you’re just trying to stay on the blasted animal! After the horse has some experience, then you start trying to win.
In addition, even with experienced horses, going for the win when I’m hopelessly outclassed can be counterproductive. At the most extreme, I risk injury to myself or my horse if I try and push beyond our capabilities in order to win. Many competitors may be willing to take on a risk of injury to themselves, but to risk injuring your horse is damned unsportsmanlike. More often, pushing beyond what a team is capable of will scare or frustrate the horse and really set back your training. There’s no sense in trying to win today if it means ruining my chances of winning when I’m better matched (and spending an awful lot of hours in the saddle trying to get my horse to forget that “I shouldn’t have tried to do it in three strides” disaster :rolleyes: ).
It’s all about setting objectives. In some competitions, you are trying for a win. In others, you’re just there to get experience.
Sorry, but in this case I think that the “double standard” claim is bullshit, too. If you’re only pursuing romance with women who make you compete for their attention/affection, how does that make you more of a man? And how does it make those women any more worthy of your efforts than men who would do the same?
I have a feeling that someone is going to come along and say something like “but when it comes to romance, you’re competing simply by presenting yourself as attractively as you can on a day-to-day basis.” That’s not the kind of romantic competition I’m talking about, and Hello Again will have to correct me if I misunderstood the original reference to it. I’m talking about situations where a guy makes me feel as though he’s choosing between dating me or dating someone else, and it becomes like a game show to see who can “impress” him the most (or something). That’s the kind of bullshit mindgame I refuse to be a part of.
I think that attitudes like mine (and Anne Neville’s) represent a minority view, though, because every guy I’ve dated has been surprised to discover that I don’t get jealous (and I think that a common root of competition is jealousy). I would never make a guy choose between dating me or dating someone else – he’s free to date both of us. I only request a promise of monogomy when we start having sex regularly. And the whole “ex girlfriend” or “ex wife” spectre never bothers me: I make it clear from the start that as long as the guy swears there is no further romantic or physical involvement with an ex, they can be best friends for all I care (which bit me on the ass in my last relationship, but it wasn’t my fault that he thought “best friends” meant “co-dependent”). I simply refuse to compete for someone’s attention/affection, because of the reason I stated earlier: if he really wants to be with someone else, there ain’t a whole hell of a lot I can do about it.
Thanks for the post Maddystrut. I had a long, fairly incomprehensible post that tried to explain this mindset as it relates to horse sport, but you summed it up a lot better. I do eventing, which is usually considered the least “competitive” in attitude, while being the most “competitive” in difficulty (debateable, but eventing is a kind of triathlon that tests a variety of skills). It is not unusual for people completing a run to give people who are starting theirs some advice on issues on course they might not have noticed, like bad footing, spooky distractions, or awkward approaches – in other words, giving their competition an advantage! I think its because eventers know that arriving at an event with both horse and rider prepared mentally and physically is a difficult task – and just getting around all three phases is an achievment.
I think pepole that are more comfortable with the “self-improvement” mindset are more attracted to sports – such as horse riding, or diving, or gymnastics, or figure skating – in which there is a subjective element. After all, a judge’s ruling is an opinion, not a fact like a baseball score. If you can’t keep your own goal in mind, it can drive you crazy.
I’m not sure how gender factors into this. It is a fact that more men are interested in the objective horse sports (timed Jumper rounds, western Gaming, even Polo) than the subjective ones (hunters, dressage, eventing, western Pleasure).
I don’t know. Do you consider it your duty to get offended easily and act like an asshole?
:rolleyes: OK, OK, so I read a little too much in right there.
I’d still be curious to know whether or not you see interpersonal competition as somehow a higher calling than self-improvement.