“A
thing without opposition ipso facto does not exist.” –Charles Sanders Pierce
It’s true that competition is not an unalloyed good; when participants
adopt a win-at-all-costs mindset and go outside the rules, they can harm their
opponents, as well as society as a whole. And while competition can bring out
the best in some people, its pressure can also cause others to anxiously
flounder.
But competition, when engaged in by those who keep a healthy mindset and
embrace fair play, can be an enormously powerful force for good and has a
number of important benefits.
In Part I, we will examine each of these vitalizing benefits in turn.
Chapter 1:
Competition Makes Us Better
There has been a lot of talk in
the past few years about deliberate practice as the key to mastering any skill,
and with good reason. Research from psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and others
has shown that effortful, deliberate practice is an important element in
gaining mastery in any domain.
Nevertheless, it’s just one element.
Competition is another. In fact, you might call it the original
performance-enhancing drug.
The first psychologist to uncover the effect of competition on performance was
Norman Triplett. Back in 1898, Triplett noticed that cyclists tended to have
faster times when they were riding in the presence of another person as opposed
to riding alone. To test this phenomenon in the lab, he created a “Competition
Machine” — a game where you had to reel in a line of silk cord as quickly as
you could.
Triplett had a group of children spin his Competition Machine two times:
one time alone and one time against another competitor. Triplett’s theory about
people performing better when in competition was verified: 50% of the children
reeled the cord faster when faced with a competitor compared to when they were
alone. About 25% of the children achieved the same time whether they
were alone or competing, and another 25% had worse
times when they were competing than when they were
alone. (We’ll explore why some people may not be affected or perform worse
during competition, and how the latter can overcome that effect later on.)
Researchers who followed Triplett built upon his initial research using
more sophisticated experiments.
For example, in a 2012 study cyclists were asked several
times to pedal as fast as they possibly could for 2,000 meters on a stationary
bike, in order to establish their baseline “personal record.” They were then
put in front of a screen that projected their avatar, along with an avatar they
were told was of a competitor they were racing against, who was obscured behind
a partition in the room. In fact, the “competitor” was simply an avatar set to
go at the participant’s own best time.
And yet, despite the fact the participants were sure they could go no faster
than they had during the trial cycles, once engaged in the heat of competition,
12 of 14 were able to beat their previous records.
In another study, recreational weightlifters were able
to bench press more weight when competing against others than when practicing
by themselves, and the effect was even greater when they competed in front of
an audience.
The
effort-enhancing benefits of competition extend beyond the world of sport as
well. Studies have shown that competition in classrooms motivates children
(especially boys) to engage boring tasks, while other research has demonstrated
that competitive culture in some workplaces makes employees more committed to
their job, and more apt to go the extra mile in their role.
These studies that have been going on
for over a century merely confirm what most of us already knew intuitively:
Competition can make us better.
Why is that?
Well, the downside of competition — greater stress — is also its upside.
While chronic stress is bad for your health, and over-anxiety
can indeed cause you to choke, the occasional stress response, if positively
embraced, can prime you for greater performance.
Knowing that we’re competing with someone sets off a cascade of hormonal and
neurochemical changes in our bodies and brains that prepare us for peak
performance. Under ordinary circumstances, your brain is very stingy in releasing physiological
resources; it will tell you you’re fatigued long before your body
will actually become physically exhausted.
But when you’re competing, your brain goes into fight-or-flight mode and
becomes more generous in doling out the physiological resources you need to
face the “threat.” Your heart rate increases, your testosterone goes up (which
increases your drive for success), cortisol is released (which boosts your
alertness), and you feel like you have more energy to burn. Your brain also gets very motivated by its chance to
increase your status, and releases dopamine, which drives you
towards a reward.
These physiological, and consequently, psychological changes allow us to dig deep and push ourselves past our preconceived
limits. You don’t get this effect when you’re practicing by yourself
or even with your friends, because there’s nothing truly at stake.
It’s important to keep in mind that you don’t even have to win to get these benefits. During the 2008 men’s Olympic swimming relay, in which the Americans won in dramatic fashion, the four teams that lost still finished ahead of the world record time. While they didn’t win the race, they improved simply by taking part in a close, intense competition.
Besides providing a performance boost, competition also helps us improve by
providing an external source to measure ourselves against. Competitors can
reveal flaws and weaknesses in ourselves we didn’t know we had. If we lose, we
can take that feedback back to our practice and work on it so that we can
do better next time.
Thus, while people often say the best kind of competition is striving to beat
ourselves, if we truly want to find another gear, we need to compete against
others.
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