I like to carve spoons.
I also like meditating in the morning, reading books, and farming.
None of these seem “competitive.” There isn’t a prize or adversary. The premium is on learning, attention, and practice.
And yet, they are competitive in that by allocating my time, energy, and attention to carving, sitting, or reading, I am not doing something else.
In this way, competition is key to the idea of mastery. It’s not just mastering the mental and physical aspects of something. It’s mastering the demands and distractions that sift away your attention and focus. It’s learning to love, or at least make peace with, the tedium of repetition and incremental progress that guards the doors to true mastery.
For those of us in the world of business and commerce, mastery unlocks social status, earning power, autonomy, and financial security.
The vehicle for capturing those prizes goes through becoming a master of something scarce and valued by others.
If you think about it, you’ve signed up for two different but related competitions:
- How you allocate your time, money, and attention.
- How you capture other people’s time, money, and attention.
Your success in the second competition almost always comes at the expense of another player in the game you choose to play.
That doesn’t mean they can’t have their own success.
It does mean they won’t have yours.