Must we compete?

Yesterday's post about cooperative sports reminded me about something I've wanted to share with you - a question I've wanted to ask you.

When I was writing a review of quite a sweet little children's game - a race-around the track kind of game - I found myself, near the end of the review, describing, in detail, how to play the game without really competing. I wrote:

My grandkids happened to have a problem with competition. So, we played with only two baby frogs: the "Happy Frog" and the "Sad Frog." One of us would throw the dice, and then all of us would select the eye. We pooled our collective memory. If we guessed correctly, we'd move the Happy frog to the next lily. If we were wrong, the Sad frog would advance. No one "owned" either of the frogs. We were like gods, cheering for the Happy frog when the Happy frog won. Cheering for the Sad frog when she got to move. Sure, sure, we wanted to Happy frog to win. But, in the end, it turned out that the Sad frog won. Which, of course, made her Happy. And us, too.

When I discussed this with the PR person at the game company, and with a family member, I found myself on the wrong end of a surprisingly passionate defense of competition. The gist of the argument (for they both said almost the same thing, as if they had been reading from the same script) being that children need to learn how to compete, how to win and how to lose, because such was the world, and such the path to survival and success. So passionate were these arguments that I wound up having to beg to differ, and I mean beg.

I guess it's because I've followed a different path - a path not of competition, but of differentiation. Rather than predicating my success on being "better than" I've found something close to success by being "other than." Being myself, basically, exploring what it is that makes me unique, and uniquely connected to my world, this one, the one we share.

Recently, I starting writing about collaboration again, online, virtual collaboration, posting articles on a site called "Coworking." And it seems to me that I've found, in this very virtual community, a very large network of people who also are less interested in competing than they are in finding ways to do that which they are uniquely able to do. Creating and following their own paths, looking, not for people they can be better than, but for people with whom they can work together, to create something - a service, product, opinion - that is as true and as different and as valued they value their truths, their differences, their selves.

It could be that my focus on collaboration is as narrow as other people's focus on competition, and that there's a wiser path somewhere that is a synthesis between the two. But, until that time, I thought it might be useful to ask the question: must we compete? Are we failing our kids by not helping them learn how to be better competitors? Do we do our kids injustice by not teaching them how to keep score? Do we help them by teaching them how to get better at losing?


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith