Of Darwin, Machiavelli, and Jack Welch

I've been watching the X-Games a little bit recently and have been intrigued by this: competition while seeking the benefit of one's competitor.

It's like competition gone right: using yourself and the other to make progress.

In other words, me winning is not as important as having someone, anyone, completing a double 720 ollie grab super grind flip thing that's totally the rad sick nasty, brah.

And I love it.

Can this attitude carry over into other areas of life (business and politics, most notably)? It's so hard to revel in the success of another, but why is that? Well, we are all certainly insecure (when was the last time you didn't want to feel cool - by some standard?). Social Comparison Theory (wikipedia) would tell us that we find our identity in relation to others. My hypothesis is that a lot of the competitive spirit in us comes from the fact that everyday in school as we develope into our selves, our "success" is tied to our grades, and our grades are merely a measuring stick as to how we compare to our peers. Grades are a completely arbitrary standard.

We don't measure success by the means, but by the ends. I'm not sure this is ideal. One sports team practices longer and harder than another team who wins, but the losing coach still gets fired. Or, a salesman makes more calls than another who got one fortuitously large account, we look at their bottom lines to declare the former a worse salesman. I just have a hard time accepting these win/lose parameters as standards of "success." Naturally, someone HAS to win the game. Someone WILL sell more widgets. So how can an inevitable reality be used to judge someone's performance, especially when their performance does not completely affect the outcome (the best pitch in the world can still be hit as a homerun... this doesn't make the pitch bad). I'm not really sure of a better standard, per se, except that the means are important, and maybe more important than the ends.

This is another reason why art is so cool. Competition doesn't set the standard for assessing the quality of what has been created by the artist. My song can be evaluated independently of your song. Our same businesses often can't, though. And we both can't be elected to the same office.

So let's make business, politics, and sports more like art. The only way I can think of right now on how to do that is to love each other - seek the best for the other while doing your thing. Take conversation over arguments and common goals over agendas. Who knew that flipping dirt bikes in mid-air would one day be judged for style?

Thoughts?

-Brody