Keep Your Eyes on Your Own Page
When I was a teenager (the nerdy classical pianist kind) my piano teacher repeatedly made it clear that competitions only matter if they help you. I competed in a lot of piano competitions at this time, so it was a little strange to hear that it was possible for them to not matter, but it made sense: if you don’t make it anywhere in a competition, life carries on as it was and you continue on your path to becoming better. If you do make it somewhere—say, a finalist round, or a coveted “First Place” distinction—you might have access to more opportunities, and that matters because it helps you on the path to becoming better.
Everything is ultimately about that path to becoming better. Becoming better doesn’t mean working your way towards being the person with the most awards, but working your way towards being as good as you can be at your craft, which is a journey without a destination. It’s kind of like Zeno’s dichotomy paradox, which shows that it’s mathematically impossible to reach any destination because you can always divide the remaining journey in half thanks to the existence of infinity, rendering all motion an illusion. (In other words, the journey to greatness is infinite and the arrival at greatness is impossible.)
I recently attended the Catalyst Story Institute festival with my pilot screenplay American Virtuosa, which was an official selection in the festival. At the end of an incredibly inspiring and intense festival week (script reads! screenings! networking! panels! workshops!), I found myself at a podium accepting an award for Outstanding Drama Pitch—a surreal experience to say the least. While this festival technically consisted of a competition for screened pilots, scripts, and pitches, the atmosphere was overwhelmingly one of support and collaboration. (Are you a screenwriter or a filmmaker? I can’t recommend the experience enough.)
However, a minor mental spiral began to happen in the days after the festival. Those other people I met were all so good! They all had so many projects! There were people who not only wrote their projects but directed them! Not only directed their projects but starred in them! There were people who make a living in this industry and people with representation and people pitching to Netflix and HBO! Who am I – a baby screenwriter representing her first ever script – to be in this environment?
I wasn’t feeling competitive per se with any of the other festival attendees (I’d have to feel more advanced in the field to have the confidence and the work to back me up that competitiveness requires), but I found myself feeling extra aware of others’ accomplishments and feeling small in their presence. I started to feel discouraged, simply thanks to my own mind. Remember, in the external world, I had actually received a physical award. Shouldn’t this have made me feel bigger instead of smaller? As it turns out, the internal world is far more powerful than the external world, and feeling discouraged and small is generally what happens when competitiveness takes the wheel (as opposed to you being the driver).
I think the reason my piano teacher stressed the “it says nothing about me if I don’t make it far in this event” outlook is that competition is especially tough in the creative world where everything is subjective (also, for the sake of your art and your mental health, it’s important to remember that your actual work is the important thing, even if being recognized for it is a nice feeling and sometimes essential to career development). It’s one thing to be competitive about a basketball game or a chess tournament where there are clear “winning” and “losing” sides, but competitiveness in the arts—where it’s more about how powerfully you touched the soul of a stranger—is its own psychological mess. Naturally, I thought I’d jump in.
Competitiveness Gets a Bad Rap
I conducted an informal poll on my social media accounts to get a sense of people’s feelings about competitiveness. I asked if competitiveness tends to make you feel down about yourself or if it motivates you in a positive way, and the results were pretty 50/50, with slightly more people indicating a dislike of competitiveness. Here’s what struck me as most interesting: even though the results were pretty split, the collective mentality was that competitiveness is inherently negative. Nobody who answered that they didn’t like competitiveness commented that they wished they felt otherwise, but those who answered that competitiveness fueled them in a positive way often had an apology-tinged follow-up, in the spirit of: “I am competitive because of X circumstance”; “I am competitive but I don’t like how competitive I am”; “I am competitive about games but certainly never about important things.”
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to think of competitiveness with some moral apprehension—I mean, have you watched Squid Game yet? Yikes. Literal competitions tend to be zero-sum games which means some (most) people have to lose in order for other people to win. Feeling competitive can, therefore, make you turn against other people or become ethically blinded by the lights of your imagined success. Presumably we can all agree that it is not a great thing to wish for the failure of everybody else or to feel “less than” when others are better than you. Also: unless your name is, I don’t know, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter or Daniel Kaluuya or Banksy, other people being better than you is literally always going to be the case.
Feeling too competitive (particularly as a side effect of perfectionism) can also stop you from pursuing a goal to begin with. Have you ever felt like since you can’t be the best at something, you’re not even going to do it at all? Hopefully you haven’t, but I’m pretty sure this is why I quit fifth-grade flute lessons after two weeks. (And, to be real, I have no regrets.)
Competition’s Cruel Sidekick
Where competitiveness starts to really go wrong is when jealousy starts to bloom. A fellow writer on Twitter recently asked for advice about how to share good news while being mindful of the fact that it can be hard for others to hear it. It’s nice to be respectful of other people’s feelings, but if other people feel bad about your good news, that’s really due to their own feelings of jealousy and those feelings are their own responsibility (I mean, to be clear, also don’t just brag about yourself 24/7 because that’s pretty off-putting, but the whole climate of social media is pretty much people sharing all the best things that ever happen to them so we all kind of have to deal).
If you’re the one feeling jealous, my condolences. My favorite words on this topic are by the great Cheryl Strayed (and I recommend clicking here to read in full), who writes in a Dear Sugar column:
If you are a writer, it’s the writing that matters and no amount of battery acid in your stomach over who got what for what book they wrote is going to help you in your cause. Your cause is to write a great book and then to write another great book and to keep writing them for as long as you can. That is your only cause … You know what I do when I feel jealous? I tell myself to not feel jealous. I shut down the ‘why not me?’ voice and replace it with one that says ‘don’t be silly’ instead. It really is that easy. You actually do stop being an awful jealous person by stopping being an awful jealous person.
Competition against other people was the kind of competition that my social media poll respondents seemed to be united against. Singer-songwriter Lukcy Charms said: “When it comes to competition with others… I’m not interested. The only one I compete against is myself, and I’m more about collaboration as a whole with others. I believe when you rise, I rise and when I rise, you rise.”
Okay, But I Love Competition
I was super into all those piano competitions in high school and beyond. I loved the motivation of the experience, the intense energy around it, the adrenaline of the days leading up to the event, the meditative morning-of, that moment of walking out on stage and giving it everything you’ve got. While I don’t compete at the piano these days, I’m still a competitive person. It’s little things as much as big things: I feel competitive about how many books people on #bookstagram read (seriously, how is anyone reading over 50 books per year, let alone reaching numbers in the triple digits?); about the screenplay project ratings on Coverfly (my project is now in the top 3% but how can I rest until it’s in the top 1%?!); with my boyfriend in the moments my cat chooses to cuddle with him over me (it has to be a body temperature difference and nothing personal, right?); and with literally every person who is younger and more accomplished than me (honestly, how is Lil Nas X only 22?! And did you know Mary Shelley finished writing Frankenstein when she was freakin’ 21? And, yes, those are the first two talented youngsters who popped into my head).
I like being a competitive person because the feeling motivates me and gets me excited to get stuff done. I also feel like I internalized that “what really matters” lesson from my piano teacher pretty well in my teens, so my competitiveness doesn’t usually make me feel unstable or out of control. I don’t tend to feel actually jealous of others (in case I led you to believe I am trying to have Lil Nas X’s career, I’m not) or hope for others to do poorly, so my competitiveness is also something that feels safe and good to me—at least in terms of my external relations. The person I’m most competitive with is myself, and she could probably use the occasional break.
Competition seems to have been pretty good for a lot of influential careers. Shakespeare was super competitive, Michael Jordan is known for being wildly so, and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were apparently pretty intense artistic rivals. My favorite example of unapologetic competitiveness is Octavia Butler’s note to herself (again, I urge you to click for the full experience), which is full of sentences like:
This is my life. I write bestselling novels. My novels go onto the bestseller lists on or shortly after publication. My novels each travel up to the top of the bestseller lists and they reach the top and they stay on top for months (at least two). Each of my novels does this. So be it! See to it!
Competitiveness can absolutely be a negative, bizarre thing—the pervasive competitiveness created by capitalism is not always so amazing, and there are plenty of related problems like how the patriarchy makes women competitive with each other over silly things like body shape and skin glowing-ness to distract us from real problems—but these topics are beyond the scope of the time I have left to finish this post. Basically, I view competitiveness as being like an iPhone. It’s literally always there for me to tap into, but I’ll for sure be happier if I can maintain control over my relationship with it.
When the Competitiveness Starts to Rage
Being human and all, I am definitely not immune to the risks that are inherent in being competitive. I can find myself slipping into “I am less-than” mode like I did after the festival pretty frequently, and I’m not completely immune to feelings of jealousy. I know that when these feelings happen, it can be hard to get a hold on them because part of why they’re happening is that something bigger has gotten a hold on you. Here’s what I find most helpful to remember in these situations:
1. Focus on yourself. Feeling less-than or feeling your inner “savage” (Cheryl Strayed’s word) starting to wish ill on others can only happen if you are, in fact, focused on others. Focusing on yourself can mean a couple of things. Self-care is an important step. Talk to yourself as you would talk to a friend having the same feelings. Reassure yourself. Do something nice for yourself. Have an honest conversation—what are you actually having feels about? (Hint: it’s probably more related to your work quality, your own ability to deal, or how your own creative process is going.) Then, see if you can re-direct your feelings of competitiveness to yourself. If you’re feeling less than others, consider how far you’ve come on your own journey and what literal things you’ve done recently that allow you to objectively measure improvement. If you can’t come up with much, well, get to work! 30 minutes of actually getting to work will probably make you feel better already. Finally, if getting to work is not your jam at the moment, just step away and take a break. Rest, rejuvenate, get inspired, and keep your eyes on your own page. Finally, get yourself a mantra that will take you out of caring so much about how you’re stacking up against others and re-center you in what matters. A quote I often return to is from Joan Didion’s Blue Nights: “Do not whine. Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.” Yes, ma’am.
2. Focus on the work. This means focusing on what you have control over. A few respondents to my social media poll said that as long as their own work is the best it can be, or if it’s the collective work they care most about (even if the best work is being done by someone else), the negative feelings associated with competition don’t take root. Instead, it’s inspiring and motivating to be around the work itself; like hearing Sviatoslav Richter play if you’re a pianist or looking at Michelangelo’s David if you’re an artist (unless, apparently, you are Leonardo da Vinci). It’s inspiring to know just how good the work could be, and it’s exciting to get in on that journey and start working on your own contributions to a collective human experience. And remember: “A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms.”
Do you need to get the competition out of your system? Try this guided meditation to get grounded.
Check out Competition: Friend or Foe?, a TEDx talk by Olympic silver medalist Annie Vernon. “We have to learn, as humans, how to get the most out of ourselves.” Also: “Competition teaches us to fail, but is failure really such a bad thing?”
Finally, let’s bask in the voice of 1968 Barbra Streisand. Is there a more competitive—or motivating—mantra than “in all of the world so far, I am the greatest star”?
Read more Wild Minds posts here.