Hi readers, today I would like to post on something that we commonly encounter in our lives: competition. I shall try to evaluate how competition from others can either help or ruin someone, and I hope you guys enjoy reading!
Firstly, what is competition? Competition is when you face rivalry from another person/group of people in something you do. We encounter competition everyday. Be it trying to attain the best results in our studies, or competing with others in sports, competition is part and parcel of our lives. Competition naturally breeds stress, and although most of us detest stress, experts have stepped up and commented that competition and stress play integral roles in our lives, helping shape us for the future. However, I would like to go one step further, and question: How much competition is enough?
I apologise if my question seems a little unspecific and cryptic. To put it in plain terms, I am trying to question if too much competition is detrimental to a person's growth and personality, despite the initial benefits. For example, John is a nice person who takes studies seriously but not to the point of obsession. He knows how to balance work, play and his social life, and has an easy-going personality. He excels in his studies as well, constantly in the top few in his class. However, one day, someone named Jack comes into his class. Jack turns out to be something of a supercomputer, extremely smart, and even surpassing John in terms of results. John is rather appalled at Jack, and thus competes with Jack in order to retain his title of top in class. To do this, John constantly studies everyday, neglecting his health and friends. He eventually manages to beat Jack in a test, but at the expense of losing most of his friends and suffering from illnesses. At the end, is the result really worth all the trouble he had gone through?
With the example I have provided above, I aim to explain how too much competition can harm someone, instead of benefitting and helping that person. If one faces much intense competition from someone else, the person would inevitably be determined to win the competitor. However, due to the equally high calibre of the competitor, to defeat the other person would be extremely hard as well. Therefore, the initial person would definitely try to defeat that person by hook or by crook. Therefore, the competition causes the person to actually neglect his life, and solely focus on winning. The person would also develop the mindset that winning is everything, and go to huge lengths for the sake of victory. To only focus on winning would mean that the person is extremely narrow and shallow, and this mindset is extremely unhealthy and would not help the person. There is definitely more to life than winning. Also, the person would develop the mindset that winning is everything, and his actions would revolve around the sole purpose of victory. Similarly, this is extremely unhealthy and detrimental to one's growth.
In conclusion, I hope I have successfully argued my point, by stating how too much competition can cause one to adopt poor and winning-oriented mindsets in life, which would ultimately harm the person in the future. However, this is not to say that competition is purely bad. If one knows how to properly manage competition and stress, and not get too worked up and obsessed with winning, then one would know how to reap the benefits of competition from others, like learning new things from the experiences.
Cheers,
Roystan
Hi Roystan,
ReplyDeleteI think that it was good of you to give background information of the topic and start listing the advantages of competition. However, the example you gave seemed to answer a different kind of question, more like "What is unhealthy competition?", because John is not really having too much of a competition (only Jack), but actually aiming too high. Another assumption you made was that John was not results-oriented. It could be that he was willing to neglect his health and his friends to get the stellar results he dreamed of! Therefore, giving a valid example is very important to support one's point.
Now let me go on to describe how I feel about competition. As you said, competition may not be bad if a person uses it wisely. For example, I always find someone of a bit higher standard than me and try to beat that person. Competition can also be self-improvement, like trying to beat one's personal-best score. Without competition, a person will always be very lazy and unwilling to improve himself. However, as you have explained quite substantially, too much competition instils a "cannot lose" mentality in the person's mind and one will suffer a lot when one eventually encounters a setback. Therefore, it is important to discern and use competition to our advantage, if not we could end up losing right from the start!
Nathanael