Competition

Most of us are competing in one way or other with somebody else in different spheres of life. All of us have a fairly good understanding of it and there is not much I have to say, which you don't know already. But as I started thinking about it, I thought I would write down my thoughts.

Question: Is competition relative or absolute? What difference does this make?

The fact is competition is always relative. Unless you have a person or benchmark to compete with, there is no meaning of competition. If there is a 100 meter record of 9.7 seconds, then you may try to break the record. You fail or you succeed. If there was no such record beforehand, there would have been nothing to compete for. When I attempted IIT-JEE 1998, I was competing against about 2 lakh students to get into one of the prestigious IITs.

So whats so important about being relative? Actually relativity makes a lot of difference. It means that you need to be only slightly better than your competition to succeed. Being no. 1 requires that you are only slightly better than the no. 2. That means that you don't need to put infinite effort in achieving your goals. If you put more effort than required, no one is going to give you any special points for it. As long as you have a slight edge over competition, you are fine. Rest of your effort you can focus on maintaining the lead. And rest of your time you can use for pursuing the better things in life.

Strategy: A strategy is needed only when you are competing. The objective of a strategy is to identify a path which will lead you to become slightly better than your competition. A strategy is always against a competition. Without a competition, there is no meaning of strategy. There is nothing like an absolute strategy.

Question: Is competing the purpose of life? Is being better than your competition the most important thing in life? Should one really care too much about being the best?

I really doubt it. Though my friends and colleagues may point out that I am one of the most workaholic persons around, but that's not the complete truth. The purpose of competition is survival. Survival is the basic requirement of life. Unless you survive well, you cannot do anything else. Hence a certain amount of spirit of competition is necessary for anybody. The catch is to identify where to stop competing and focus on other things. And its necessary to realize that survival is not the purpose of life at all. Survival is only a basic requirement of life.

Beyond that a lot of things lie. Different people have different things as important to them. For some its their family. For others its some other passion(photography, travel, etc.). Some yearn for the goodwill of the society as a whole (revolutionaries, social workers, saints). For me knowledge is what I aspire and crave for. And I look for it wherever I can find it. I wish to know more about how things work and how to build great things (mostly software). And that's what I do. That's what I focus on. And this is absolute and infinite. There is no end to it. The more I do, the more I realize that I know so less. And that keeps me going day and night.