Success You Can be Proud Of

Going through some “to read” saved blog links, these words from Steve Olson jumped out at me:

Many of our interpersonal anxieties and social problems revolve around a dysfunctional belief that money is a measurement of fairness, equality, and human value. [via]

He linked to a piece by Charles Wheelan at Yahoo! Finance [link] which quotes research showing that people are often more motivated by a sense of competition than by the absolute amount they earn. That is, they want to feel they are doing better than others more than they want to get any particular level of reward.

Here’s Mr. Wheelan’s key point:

In other words, we care less about how much money we have than we do about how much money we have relative to everyone else. In a fascinating survey, Cornell economist Robert Frank found that a majority of Americans would prefer to earn $100,000 while everyone else earns $85,000, rather than earning $110,000 while everyone else earns $200,000.

This ties in with similar behavior in other fields, such as “competing” over who works the longest hours or suffers the greatest amount of stress [link]. It seems that our competitive society has so infiltrated people’s minds that they care more about “beating” others than anything else.

This is the path to madness.

If all you achieve is the same again, the sense of pride and excitement quickly goes out of it.

The trouble is that achievers must continue to achieve, and we have built a whole business culture around a cult of personal achievement. In many ways, achievement is always relative. Even if your are not openly competing against someone else’s success, you are competing against your own in the past. Whatever you do today can be done better tomorrow. If all you achieve is the same again, the sense of pride and excitement quickly goes out of it. Like the old saying, “Nothing succeeds like success,” you could say that nothing gives you a buzz like succeeding more than you did the last time—or more than somebody else. Just as in sport, the belief goes around that winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

Is competition somehow wrong? Should we be trying to set up some kind of collaborative utopia, where no one ever competes with anyone else?

I cannot see that this makes any sense either. Competition is everywhere throughout the natural world. Many of the comforts that we enjoy were discovered and developed from a sense of competition. Our whole capitalist economic system is based on competition.

Still, competition needs to be kept in perspective. Winning isn’t the only thing—even in sport. If it were, there would be no reason to stop athletes from using drugs to increase their chances. Much of the pleasure of a sporting match comes from it being a fair test of skill between opponents. At the end, everyone lives to play another day. The winner who humiliates and belittles the loser is seen as doing something reprehensible. Crowds love to support the underdog and see the proud champion brought down a peg or two.

If people would only take the time to slow down and reflect on what is really going on, I don’t believe there would be a problem with competition.

In business, as everywhere else, competition needs to be tempered by compassion and a sense of fairness. Payment should reflect proper reward for work done, not be used as yet another forum to display crude one-upmanship. Those who do well are rightly praised; but those who do not manage quite the same standard (yet) should be encouraged, not humiliated. That is something everyone should bear in mind as the dreaded (and typically negative) performance appraisals come around.

If people would only take the time to slow down and reflect on what is really going on, I don’t believe there would be a problem with competition. It gets out of hand because people are carried away by the thrill of winning (over almost anything) and never stop to consider the implications, or the other people involved. I hope most of us aren’t really so crude and uncivilized as to want to crow over others regardless.

Years ago, I talked with a man who was a keen tennis player, as well as a ruthless competitor at work. He told me he played tennis with his 11-year old son every weekend. “I wipe him off the court,” he said. I felt amazed (and a little sick) and so asked him why he did it. “So that one day, if he is ever good enough to beat me, he’ll feel the triumph,” he said. Then he laughed, and added: “Not that it will ever happen.” He was sick. It never seemed to occur to him that beating a child in a game of tennis was hardly an achievement; or that the constant reminder to his son of who was “top dog” was probably doing terrible things to the child’s mind.

An extreme case, of course, but it makes a point. Winning isn’t everything. Sometimes, it isn’t even anything. Success that you can be proud of comes from fair and reasonable competition. And setting a boundary on success isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s proof that the person involved has thought it through and decided that when enough is enough, keeping some balance between life’s many aspects counts for more than being better than the next guy in any one of them. Earning more doesn’t make you a better person. Nor does having a grander job title or a bigger office—especially if what it took to reach that position soiled and diminished your true worth as a human being along the way.

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