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I am competitive, and I hate to lose. When I feel like someone is going to be better than me at something, it flips a switch somewhere deep inside of me and puts me into overdrive.
This isn’t limited to the work I do at FutureFund, my free fundraising platform for K-12 school groups. I want to be the best athlete, coach, family man and software engineer that I can be. And for the most part, this works. It motivates me to strive for excellence and keep challenging myself instead of becoming too comfortable and stagnating.
But the same tendency that drives me to excel at these things can sometimes become counterproductive. My dislike of losing is actually so strong that I often hate playing board games. As you can imagine, that can really put a damper on family game night if I don’t keep it in check.
Lots of people in tech are like this because it’s a competitive landscape. Maybe it’s the same for you: anything you do, you have to do 100% — and because you put 100% of yourself into something, it’s almost impossible for your success or failure not to feel like a reflection of who you are. Like me, you have a brand, and that brand is: when you do something, you will succeed.
The trick is to keep your sense of competition healthy so that it serves your work and personal goals instead of getting in your way. Here’s how I do it — and how you can, too.
The way you respond to competition is a choice
Not everyone responds to competition in the same way. People tend to fall into one of two groups when they witness someone else succeeding at a goal they have for themselves.
The first group tries to sabotage the success they see in others. They ask how they can shift their competition’s reputation so that it’s negative. This is more commonly accepted than you might assume. We tend to look down on brands who run obvious smear campaigns against their rivals, but lots of companies get away with writing press releases that favorably compare their products or services to those of their biggest competitors.
The second group tries to improve themselves so they can match and surpass the success they see others experiencing. They become motivated to better themselves instead of casting aspersions on their rivals. This approach can feel like a lot more work, but I have found that it’s also frequently much more rewarding.
The first group’s approach might work at first — but there are obvious risks. Not only can this blow back on you if you’re too heavy-handed, but it can also provoke your rivals and motivate them to work harder against you than they normally would have. But the biggest problem is that focusing on others doesn’t do anything to improve your abilities.
The second group’s approach requires you to be unflinchingly honest with yourself and your team about your strengths and weaknesses, which can be challenging at first. But it also pays dividends. You learn where to invest your time and effort for maximum gains. You become more efficient and less likely to blame others for your mistakes, and you ultimately get closer to becoming the best you can be at what you’re doing.
Related: Why You Have to Let People Fail Now So They Can Succeed Later
Wanting to win vs. hating to lose
Once you’ve chosen to motivate yourself instead of tearing down your competitors, the next question is how to do it. Here’s one way to think about it that’s always helped me:
It’s not just about wanting to win; it’s about hating to lose. If you’re anything like me, the disappointment of losing is usually stronger for you than the joy of winning.
This doesn’t permit you to be a sore loser on those occasions when it inevitably does happen — you don’t want to ruin family game night. But making it a priority to avoid unfavorable outcomes is often helpful because it makes you more likely to fix the kinds of things that people might let slide if they’re too focused on their wins.
One of FutureFund’s major competitors ultimately went out of business because their support team routinely took weeks to get back to people. This issue would have been easy to correct, but they let it become their Achilles heel. Although it might not have felt important enough for them to fix, it turned out to be important for their users.
So we decided that one of our non-negotiables would be to answer support tickets in a reasonable amount of time — a couple of hours or less. That was easy to commit to, but it had a profoundly positive impact on our success.
Think about this in the context of your startup. Staying competitive means celebrating your wins, but never letting yourself be complacent about where there’s room for improvement.
Related: 4 Coaching Stages Every Leader Should Master to Help Others Grow
You define what winning is
Finally, you need a healthy way to quantify and acknowledge your wins. That can be difficult because, in business, it’s not always clear who’s winning. There are no universal goalposts that everyone can see.
Here’s my rule: competition is healthy when you decide what success looks like instead of letting others do it. Measure your progress by how far you’ve come in relation to the goals you’ve set instead of letting your competitors control the narrative and always being one step behind them.
Success, for me, is about being a little better than I was the day before. When you’re in a startup, your product won’t be perfect at first — or maybe ever. But you work to make sure it’s better today than it was last month — or last week, or yesterday. This way, you can at least make sure you’re heading in the right direction.
If you’ve chosen your mission carefully, this kind of progress becomes a much better benchmark for success than what some other company is doing. You can read more about that in my next article below:
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