Winning the Defeat

Why do we race? Why we always want to stay ahead of others? Why we want to get better grades than other students in our class? Why we want promotions and increments faster than our colleagues? If you stop and take a deep breath, you will realize how short is the life span of the fame you get by staying ahead in one lap of a race. No one remembers you longer than that lap. And no one remembers who lost the race to you. The fact is – there are too many races to remember the position holders of each of those.

Not only this, but we see that most of the people prefer to compete with the people they see or directly interact with. We conveniently forget that there are classes outside our class and there are offices outside our office. But we never bother comparing our performance with the students or colleagues. We mostly prefer to compete within a very closed group of people.

Now, the question is ‘why do we do this?’. Why such a strange behavior? Why do we get so happy when we beat the student next bench or the employee next cubicle, even when we certainly know that there is an endless stream of more bright students and more efficient employees? Why we want a better car than our neighbor? Why a better kept lawn? Why better jewelry than your kitty party fellows?

The answer lies in very narrow minded tendency of human brain. You don’t want to see yourself win as much as you want to see others to lose to you. That is why we want to compete with the people we can see or directly interact. And that is why I would like to win in rowing than in any other race, because only there I can see others losing to me.

But if you want to do better in life, get out of that pond. Winning every battle doesn’t matter, winning the war does.