When Intensity Isn’t Enough
Being competitive has its advantages. You always fight hard, you never give up, and you always give more than you think you are capable of. But competitiveness is useful when the battle is on equal ground.
Like in sport, where you know the other player is equally capable, so the only difference you can bring is your intensity. That sometimes creates the difference. The same competitiveness becomes useless when the battle is not on equal ground. When the fight isn’t about the finish line, when the fight isn’t about intensity anymore.
In some situations, the battle is about merit, about talent, about absolute potential, about your thinking capabilities. Competitiveness can mean you work harder and for longer hours, but it cannot produce skill overnight. And sometimes that is the edge someone has. They are simply a far better version of you, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Competitiveness ensures that you never learn to tolerate defeat. The intensity comes from an aversion to losing. That’s why even losing the smallest argument feels like defeat. They argue louder, they argue intensely, and they never back down. You can also see that they cannot handle disagreement because accepting disagreement means accepting defeat.
When such a person comes face to face with genuine raw talent, a skillset so sharp that they never thought was possible to achieve, you can see them physically shrink. Because in that moment, they realise the harshest truth: maybe they simply aren’t good enough. No matter how much intensity they bring, they are simply outsmarted and bested.
That triggers a breakdown in them. They are gripped by hopelessness, and the exhaustion of all the battles begins to weigh on them. They cannot attain peace until they have won, but they cannot win until they overcome their shortcomings. Yet they never bothered to focus on those shortcomings because they never bothered to realise that there was something within them that needed improving.
Competitiveness has its advantages only if you are also on the path of self-improvement. If you are someone who cannot accept defeat, who cannot tolerate backing down, then it’s only a matter of time before you come face to face with absolutely raw talent that will blow you out of your socks.