Let's Not Sugarcoat It

When we talk about a healthy competition, it is one that ironically, will always have some form of toxicity in it, no matter how much we try to make it sound good, or at least that's what I think.

And the reason why I think that is because the word competition simply implies you trying to be better than someone else, and that means you competing. And whether we like it or not, when we compete we simply want who we're competing against to fail or atleast come out second while we come out first (which simply is a nicer way of us wanting someone to fail).

So when we say the words Healthy Competition, to me the healthy in it simply means personal growth, even admidst all of that negativity. So when we say that these two swimmers are competing to be the best, at the end of that competition, only one of them will come out first, but the person who comes out second wouldn't technically be seen as a loser because they wouldn't end up the same way they started. They would have gained some more speed in the water, learnt some new skills, just that all of that wasn't enough to make them come out first.

That to me is what we mean by a healthy competition, but of course a little bit of bad blood would be present, because that is what motivates you to want to win, to want to be the best. And it's fine if the bad blood is kept at a minimal, but sometimes things do get out of hand and we find ourselves in a position where it's no longer a little bad blood and now we want to do all it takes to bring this person down and be better than them.

_{photo by GR Stocks}

I will tell you guys a story of the one time I and my friends decided that we were going to start a little bit of savings together. This was back in the day when we were still kids and we all just wanted to save money.

The plan at the time was for one of us to help all three of us hold our money as we saved. So that one person acted like a bank with three private accounts in it, mine and that of two of my friends. At first, it started like a friendly interesting idea, but as time went on, it got competitive.

All of a sudden everyone was trying to save more than the other person. Now at this point, it was still considered a good thing, although some of us were starving ourselves just to make sure we had more money in our savings than the other person. But then it got too competitive to the extent where one of us began to steal from their parents just to save more, and this was simply because he wasn't getting as much pocket money as the rest of us were.

That, to me was where the whole thing went from a little bit of bad blood to a big one, because he was no longer interested in the general ideology of the savings anymore, he just wanted to win, he wanted to be the guy with the most money.

Eventually we had to call off the whole thing because we all got scared of his parents finding out, and everyone took their share of their savings and did with it as they pleased. That, to me is an example of an healthy competition turned sour.