Knowing When To Stop

_{Photo by GR Stocks}

Having a competitive spirit and always wanting to win is a good thing, it's actually something that I feel should be encouraged, but there's also one more thing that people need to learn in other to balance it out, and that thing is knowing when to stop. Like I said, having a competitive spirit might be good, but not knowing when to stop and admitting that you can't always win will eventually put you in some sort of trouble.

I have this friend who I always play video games with, and though we don't gamble or have anything to lose when playing against each other, we always make sure never to lose to one another which is quite impossible seeing how someone must lose. And then whenever that person loses, we always end up giving ourselves some space because of how angry the person who loses usually is.

It's a crazy thing when you think about it because those games are meant to be fun and probably even bring us closer to each other as friends, but at the end of the day, just because of how much we both want to win, the one who loses ends up getting angry and for a while, that anger always threatens our friendship, hence the reason why we always give each other some time to get over the loss and remember that the whole thing is nothing but a game.

Luckily for us, this particular scenerio doesn't exactly put us in trouble, unlike many years ago when myself and a friend of mine had both decided to save up some money so that when it gets to December, we could both have more than enough cash to buy lots of fireworks.

We both had different boxes where we both were saving our money and I remember that we both always kept record of how much we had in the box, so whenever my friend saw me and asked how much my money was and I told him and maybe mine was a bigger amount than his, he would leave for a while and then return with some cash to add to his box.

I never really questioned where he was getting the money from because I had assumed it was his pocket money because the money I was saving were my pocket money, but then it turned out that they weren't his money. Whenever he asked me how much I had and mine were bigger, he would go to his Ma shop to steal from her to add to his box because he didn't want my money to be bigger than his.

_{Photo by Nicolas Hoizey}

He was a competitive fellow who didn't know when to stop and that ended up putting him in trouble. His Ma had caught him stealing one day so he had to confess, almost putting a shocked me in trouble because I had no idea he was stealing those money. My only saving grace was that I had told my brothers about the savings and they too had given me some money to add to mine, so when my parents heard about the whole thing, my brothers were the ones who came to my rescue, explaining to my parents that my savings weren't stolen money and that some of it were given to me by them.

Of course a huge sum of the money ended up going to my mom for "safe keeping" and when I later asked her for it in the future, she had reminded me of how much she and my dad had spent on me ever since the day I was born and all that, which basically translated to "I've spent your money and you're never getting it back".

Anyways, all I'm saying is competition is good but always make sure you don't end up doing what you shouldn't do just because you want to win.