The Power of Self Competition
Let’s focus on our personal growth instead of comparing ourselves to others
“Never rush to be the first. Slow down and be your best. Life is not a race. It's a playground to radiate your uniqueness.”
― Hiral Nagda
I started my early school years at a place called Germantown Friends in Philadelphia. It’s an old Quaker institution, with progressive values and deep roots. There are a few essential lessons you learn very early when you are part of a community that rests on Quaker values.1 One of the biggest lessons that has stuck with me my whole life was the celebration of a non-competitive culture.
I wish this were more universal in learning settings.
The Big Idea
There’s a term healthy competition. Sure, it can fuel hard core effort towards the positive - it does for athletes, elected officials and businesses. We value drive and motivation, and that is frequently seen as requiring a race with something or someone else.
It is partly true that the world is competitive, too. It is difficult to entirely avoid competition in life.
But certainly competition we create in schools is determined by us - it’s how choose to evaluate, what we choose to see and amplify.
We can just as easily live an existence defined more by collaborative and self-referential goals than by competition with others. To say the real world is inherently competitive is a myth.
What Mary Feary and Babu Stern taught me back in kindergarten was something we don’t talk about in schools: There are people who do great without competing against others. This is where we find our real drive.
When you try to compete with others, you are following someone else’s rules and buying into their values instead of creating your own game. You are creating additional stress for yourself by relinquishing control of your performance indicators. You are moving towards someone else’s goals instead of in a direction that’s yours to shape.
The alternative: self competition.
Self competition seeds our voice, our true north, our value and our values.
External competition creates cultures, in high/secondary schools especially, that breed anxiety and push many away from their potential. When we compare ourselves to others, we frequently end up focusing our energy on bringing them down instead of raising ourselves up.
Competition could be about chasing our own unrealized potential. We will never beat our future selves - by definition, your future self is always one step ahead. But we can strive to accomplish our ideal, as long as we have compassion for our past self.
Making Big Ideas Usable
What does it mean to compete against yourself, and how might we work towards it? Here are ideas and resources. Would love to hear your thoughts.