Competition as a Means of Collaboration

The whole idea is that you want the other person to raise the bar on competition and pass you up, so that you're motivated to come right back and do the same to them.

Competition and collaboration sound like opposites, when there’s actually a way in which competition can be reasonably viewed as a means of collaboration.

It’s when you’re engaged in friendly competition with people that you’re connected to and care about, where the point is to motivate each other and make each other better.

Kind of like what you would expect on a serious sports team:

• During practice, teammates will be competing against each other, trying to create a high-intensity practice environment where they can make each other better.
• They might even do some light, joking trash-talk to get each other riled up and motivated to put their best foot forward -- not anything mean, of course, but just enough to get the other person to react like "damn, let me show you what I got!"

The thing is, it’s not even about winning the competition.

It’s about growing and improving, and the competition is just a way to enter a psychological state where you’re motivated to work hard and maximize your effort.

In this type of competition, it actually feels good to see the other person take the lead and raise the bar.

The whole idea is that you want the other person to raise the bar on competition and pass you up, so that you’re motivated to come right back and do the same to them.

It’s like you’re creating a video game: each time one person passes another person up, a new level and challenge is created.

Everyone has fun playing the game and wants to get to really high levels.

You could even call it teamwork: as a team, you try to maximize your total absolute level by having everyone compete on their individual relative levels.