{"id":1646,"date":"2023-03-31T12:47:21","date_gmt":"2023-03-31T12:47:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/?p=1646"},"modified":"2023-03-31T12:47:22","modified_gmt":"2023-03-31T12:47:22","slug":"protagonist-rule-3-compete-intentionally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/2023\/03\/31\/protagonist-rule-3-compete-intentionally\/","title":{"rendered":"Protagonist rule #3: Compete intentionally"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Photo by GR Stocks on Unsplash<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For almost all of human history, we lived in scarcity. We lacked food, housing and safety and lived in small communities that could easily be wiped out by competing tribes. It\u2019s hard to imagine for most of us, but famines occurred regularly. Warfare between tribes was the norm in many regions of the world. And being ostracized and expelled from the community you were born into was a death sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The notion of scarcity introduces the need for competition. If there\u2019s only enough food for one of us, I\u2019d rather be the one that gets to consume it as my innate desire to live will cause me to choose myself over the other person. Or, by extension, I prefer for my children to live even if that means that those of someone else might not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After millennia of scarcity, humans are hardwired to compete. As we do not only compete one on one but also in groups, this causes us to build hierarchies. These hierarchies then become our focus and we constantly strive to get one up on our nearest competitors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, humanity has twice as many mothers as fathers among our ancestors. The explanation is that in prehistoric tribes, the women would only choose men in the top half of the male hierarchy for mating. The men in the bottom half never got to have offspring. So, competing and clawing your way up the male hierarchy was literally a battle of life and death for your genes. And, of course, the consequence is that we\u2019re the progeny of the most competitive individuals among homo sapiens and drawn to competition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Very few living in the Western world are experiencing scarcity at an existential level. We all have food, housing and safety. So, in many ways, the need to compete has no existential basis anymore. However, millennia of natural selection don\u2019t just disappear overnight and we all have an innate need for and drive to compete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The challenge is, of course, that in modern life, the number of hierarchies to compete in is infinite. We compete in sports, animal breeding, beauty, investing, fashion, art, cars, housing, careers, travel, social media and numerous other arenas. There\u2019s no end to the opportunities offered by society and industry to spend your energy and time in competitions of a wide variety of categories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you want to be the protagonist of your life and be successful at work as well as in life in general, this means that you need to be careful in the competitions you engage in. It\u2019s important to put your energy into competing in hierarchies that align with your purpose and that matter to you, yours and the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In general, my experience is that two factors are beneficial to consider when thinking about where to expend your life energy and time: intrinsic motivators and competing with yourself. Most of us will know the notion of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivators. The former are concerned with focusing on external rewards, such as money, praise and fame. Intrinsic motivators are your internal drivers that align with what you intrinsically experience as meaningful. They\u2019re based on autonomy, mastery and purpose. If you feel that what you do matters, you\u2019re good at it and you get the freedom to perform the work in the way you want, you\u2019re aligning with your intrinsic motivators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my experience, focusing your energy and time on your intrinsic motivators is much more rewarding in the long run. Of course, this isn\u2019t black and white as, for instance, mastery is often measured in comparison to others. However, competing with others easily becomes a treadmill without end whereas the honing of skills and capabilities over time is inherently rewarding in and of itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second factor is concerned with who you compete with. Although much of modern culture is focused on competing with others, if only because it aligns so well with our genetic makeup, in my experience it\u2019s much more rewarding and valuable to compete with yourself. To focus on small, continuous improvements that make you a little bit better today than what you were yesterday, last week or last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re not intentional about carefully selecting where to compete and where to ignore competition, it\u2019s very easy to spend your energy and time on a wide variety of things where you don\u2019t make any reasonable progress. You can easily spread yourself too thin. Even when you focus on one or a few hierarchies to compete in, but these don\u2019t align with your purpose or you focus mostly on competing with others instead of yourself, you\u2019ll lose motivation over time. In my experience, people can accomplish great things only if there\u2019s a deep, innate drive that is sustained over time. And this requires internal alignment with your purpose and intrinsic motivation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re genetically wired to compete in hierarchies as for most of the history of humankind, we lived in a state of scarcity and it easily came to \u201ceither me or the other person.\u201d Modern life offers an infinite number of hierarchies to compete in and it\u2019s easy to spread yourself too thin competing in too many hierarchies or to compete in those that don\u2019t align with your purpose. Instead, focus on competing in areas that are driven by your intrinsic motivators and, where possible, focus on competing with yourself. As Martin Seligman said, just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Want to read more like this? Sign up for my newsletter at\u00a0jan@janbosch.com<\/a> or follow me on janbosch.com\/blog<\/a>, LinkedIn (linkedin.com\/in\/janbosch<\/a>), Medium<\/a> or Twitter (@JanBosch<\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For almost all of human history, we lived in scarcity. We lacked food, housing and safety and lived in small communities that could easily be wiped out by competing tribes. It\u2019s hard to imagine for most of us, but famines occurred regularly. Warfare between tribes was the norm in many regions of the world. And … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1646"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1648,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1646\/revisions\/1648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}