Before I complete my argument, I need to mention two things:

1. I am a very competitive person. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of that fact, but I do try to keep my tendency to be competitive in check because I think it is quite frequently a bad thing.

2. A lot of my thinking surrounding competition comes from a book I read as a freshman in college called “No Contest” by Alfie Kohn. It’s one of the texts that I still own.

The problem with competition is that in order for me to win, someone has to lose. While we could come up with a number of situations that fit that description, I would argue that most situations fail to fit that definition. If we take sport and contest out of the mix, then I would argue that very few situations require you to lose for me to win. As a Christian, I don’t believe that the only way for me to achieve salvation is at the expense of another. In fact, I believe that salvation is only achieved cooperatively.

I appreciate the time you put into your post, so I would like to address each of your three points individually:

1. Competition is highly motivating.
There is no question that this is true for many people (myself included). I would argue that this is a result of socialization and that it isn’t necessarily good. I think it is far better to be motivated to do our best work than to be motivated to do better work than someone else. Keep in mind that I am not arguing against measurement. I think measurement is important. I even think that we should be able to say (as in Sharon’s example above) that one video was the best video. I think that as a society, however, we should teach our children to strive for excellence for the sake of excellence, not so that we can say, “I’m the best” or even “I’m better than you.”

2. It teaches important lessons about life.
I think you made the best case for cooperation when in support of this point you wrote, “We achieve our best when we are closely matched to high achieving peers and we find ourselves rooting for them as well as for us, because the journey to excellence is too lonely and difficult to face alone.” I agree with most of this. (The only thing I disagree with is that the road to excellence is lonely. On the contrary, I think the road to excellence is one of the least lonely places to be. I don’t see a lot of exceptionally talented lonely people.). Rather than rooting for our high achieving peers, people who are competitive tend to root for themselves at the expense of their peers. I think it is important to distinguish between structural competition and individual competitiveness. Some things are structurally competitive — sports, spelling bees, etc. It is impossible and undesirable to remove competition from these events (both football teams can’t win, only one person will win the bee). I don’t believe that these events are inherently bad. I do believe, however, that these types of events foster individual competitiveness, or the desire to best your peers, and I think that desire is usually a negative thing.

3. Competition serves to uncover true excellence.
I think measurement uncovers true excellence, not competition. Additionally, most of the bad behavior I have witnessed has been the result of individual competitiveness. I believe that the first person to crack the 4 minute mile barrier did it to achieve something great, not to best his peer. It would be sad if I’m wrong because that accomplishment would mean much less when it was bested by someone else. I think that achievement should stand on its own as a great accomplishment even though it has since been surpassed many times.

In business school, I regularly heard about how competition drives companies to be better, faster, and cheaper. We are all familiar with the dangers of monopolies that take advantage of no competition to overcharge and under-perform. I believe there are circumstances where competition is both necessary and fun. Who would want to watch a football game where neither team won or where both teams cooperated to score alternating touchdowns? I would classify most of these scenarios as structurally competitive and put them in a separate class. I believe that it is important to avoid letting these structurally competitive scenarios drive us to becoming individually competitive. I think we should look for ways to cooperate with our peers while striving for personal excellence. To steal a line from Stephen Covey, we should “Think Win-Win”. It may sound trite, but it has served me well in business.

Last year they didn’t want us to declare a best video for our youth group’s film fest. Everyone knew which was the best anyway. But why not give credit where it is due? So I came up with goofy awards for each film.

Ours was best anyway. ; )-