competitive fire
If you knew me as a kid, you’ll likely remember that I absolutely hated to lose. That was mostly a bad look. If you knew me as a young man, you may have noticed that I had grown up a bit and simply loved to win. That still, was often a bad look. If we’ve met more recently, you’ve (hopefully) noticed that I just enjoy the opportunity to compete, which has helped me to be much nicer to myself and those around me.
Throughout my life and work, I’ve thought a ton about this competitive fire in myself and others. From childhood, I've noticed that driven, successful people tend to be competitive. That part isn't surprising. What's taken me longer to understand is that the nature of that competitiveness, the shape it takes, ends up making all the difference.
Competitive fire is a lot like an actual fire. If it is contained well, it can heat your home and cook your food. But left unchecked, it can also burn down your house. I’ve certainly experienced both, and I imagine you have too. The competitiveness that sharpens me before a big presentation is helpful. It pushes me to prepare and rehearse. But that same instinct has also caused me, at times, to turn teammates into rivals. If too many of us feel this way, we end up with a room full of talented people quietly working against each other. And zero-sum games aren’t much fun to play.
What’s been even more fascinating for me, is observing how I, and many of the organizations we work with, try to manage this competitive fire. I’ve seen at least three different approaches.
One option is to pretend we don't need to be competitive at all. Smooth it over, act like everyone is simply "doing their best," and hope the sharp edges never show up. I understand the appeal. Lord knows I’ve tried to cage my competitive instincts, but that kind of drive doesn't just disappear because we stop naming it. If we’re not careful, it’ll actually get worse, going underground for a while and then coming up in all sorts of ugly ways. We’ve all witnessed a relative playing board games at a family gathering, pretending to not care, while nearly bursting out of their skin. Yes, Aunt Shirley, it’s your turn again!
The second option is to keep the fire, but try to keep it entirely to ourselves. This might sound like, “I’m only competing against myself”. There's something appealing here too, and for certain seasons of life it's probably necessary. But let’s be real, you check the leaderboard at your CrossFit gym. You might just be trying to be “better than yesterday”, but you’re also trying to be better than Mike in the 6:30 am class. Seriously though, this path leaves us alone at the exact moments we need people the most. At best, isolated ambition might get you to the top of something, but it rarely gets you there with anyone standing next to you. And at worst, this kind of fire will spill out of the fireplace and burn some of the people.
Fortunately, there's a third way, and it's the one that has underpinned every meaningful environment I've been part of. The best teams and organizations are ones where you compete FOR each other, not simply with each other. You keep score, openly, without pretending the scoreboard doesn't exist. But you build two things underneath that scoreboard: an egalitarian culture, where the score doesn't determine anyone's worth, and a functional structure, where everyone's role and effort actually connects to something bigger than their own stat line.
That combination, high expectations paired with high support, is rarer than it should be, and I've been lucky enough to spend most of my adult life inside it.
At West Point, the competition was constant and completely public. Rank order, physical scores, academic standing, all of it visible, sometimes right on your uniform shirt and gym shorts. And yet the whole institution was built to funnel that competitiveness toward service and teamwork. You learned quickly that the classmate next to you wasn't the enemy. The standard (or the Dean) was the enemy, and you needed each other to win. Cooperate and graduate.
Blayne’s daughter, Penny
Special Forces training was the first place in the Army I’d ever heard the phrase, “pays to be a winner.” Coming from the conventional Army where mass-punishment was the norm, I could hardly believe what I was hearing. In that environment, you were encouraged to compete and to win. You were pushed to give your absolute best, but it was also made clear that you were striving to be your best because the men on your future teams were going to depend on it. You compete to be the guy your team can count on. Nothing clarifies what competition is actually for like that kind of environment. Competitiveness there didn't just point toward cooperation; it pointed all the way to something close to love.
And even in the nonprofit world, where there's no obvious scoreboard, the same pattern holds. The competitiveness there gets channeled into excellence and impact, always for the mission. I’ve never seen so many talented people work so hard for such little money and credit. To this day, I am amazed at things like the Veteran Wellness Alliance, where organizations that could easily be labeled competitors have figured out a way to compete for each other, and those they collectively serve.
Three very different worlds. All of them keep score, in the open, and all of them somehow use that scorekeeping to bring people closer together instead of pulling them apart. And in every case, it hasn’t happened by accident. Great organizations understand that competitiveness is not the problem. They don’t pretend that driven people can just put it aside. Instead, they harness it. They make the mission clear, and help everybody understand why it deserves their very best.
I spent my youth (and probably too much of my adult life) assuming competitiveness and cooperation were opposites, that you had to choose one at the expense of the other. It was only after living inside a few environments that had figured out how to hold both, high expectations and high support, keeping score and keeping each other, that I started to understand what was actually possible.
The goal was never to kill the fire in driven people. It's to build a hearth good enough to hold it.
