In many contexts, the word “competition” brings up a negative connotation. When I hear this word, I am reminded of the time in high school where I had to pull multiple all-nighters memorizing the textbook verbatim just for one more point on the exam that would bring up my class rank. I naturally tend to associate stress, tiredness and lack of motivation with competition. But is competition such a terrible thing? If so, why is it everywhere around us?
The basic principle behind competition is most likely that in a competitive setting, every individual participating in the competition will be further motivated to develop oneself in order to outperform the competitors. In a school context, students will be incentivized to study harder and in a workplace setting, employees will be motivated to work longer and focus better. In a larger scope, companies will be motivated to develop products of better qualities and countries will be motivated to implement policies that would further develop their citizen’s well-being. In principle, competition is beneficial as a powerful motivator.
However, competition does not always bring these expected positive results. In fact, there is a very fine line between competition as an incentive to motivate development and excessive competition which rather disincentivizes any participation. An example is found in economics. A perfectly competitive market is one in which numerous firms offer the exact same product to satisfy the demand. It is a perfect competition, because the firms are identical to one another and so are their products. Hence, there is competition between firms, in the sense that a customer can choose any of the firms to purchase from, but the competition does not result from a difference in quality of the product offered. And this market form is considered the worst type and in fact does not actually exist in our society. Under perfect competition, there is no further motivation for development, because given the same product, no one would pay a higher price. When competition goes to the extreme by making all products offered the same quality, whether that be high or low, it disincentivizes any innovation.
The same is seen in real life, too. In high school, students, including myself, were highly motivated to study harder for exams to become the winners in the competition. In a glance this was beneficial; it is of course helpful for students to be highly motivated in academics. However, as a few months passed by, there were a few of my colleagues who “gave up” on certain subjects. After gauging other students’ preparations and talents in the subject, some students completely desisted any possibility of winning the competition, hence choosing to essentially leave the competition. The reason for this lies in the competition itself. The academic competition made it so that the goal of learning in school was a higher rank, not learning the knowledge per se. Therefore, when students perceived that getting a high rank would be difficult, they chose to completely let go of education, as it was seen as worthless in this setting. Such is an example where unlike its intention, competition can be highly demotivating and have an adverse effect on something as important as education.
This fine line between positive competition encouraging development and an excessive one encouraging giving up is hard to identify and is only realized after the line has been crossed. I believe this is mostly because “falling behind” is one of the greatest fears we feel as humans. Hence, when competition is at hand, every other objective, including learning, making memories, being healthy and anything else, feels unimportant. Winning and overshadowing others belittles these healthier motives, making competition seem like the only meaningful things that exist. So it leads us away from the qualities that are important and only focuses our entire attention to winning in the competition. It is true that competition forms the basis of most aspects of society from education to market activities, so we will encounter it wherever we go. Hence, I think it is important to take notice of it to make sure that we utilize competition as a tool for development and beware of the dangers of excessively committing to it. Of course, it is easier said than done, but at least thinking about it is the first step on the road. What are your experiences and thoughts about competition?