In a world loaded with titles, power, prejudices and ladder climbing, it’s hard to picture true equality. Bosses command, politicians divide, and CEOs oversee the hive of worker bees. And the widely-held belief? Take competition and hierarchy out of the equation and business morphs into a soft, semi-profitable love-in. Maybe you’re a believer. It’s a large, competitive congregation. And they’re losing.On the surface, there’s not much reason to reject the competitive creed. In fact, we keep inequality alive seduced by the illusion that it somehow makes us better when it actually hurts us. And the evidence speaks. A meta-analysis of 265 studies found competition almost never wins. When competition is absent, creative output surges by thirty-percent, communication improves by fifty-percent, and time to market increases by thirty-five percent. The good news? Ingenuity and progress thrive despite competition, not because of it.This episode is an illuminating exploration of competition and equality. We uncover why and where a competitive mentality trips (spoiler: almost always,) where it prevails, what fuels our tribal instincts (us v. them), and how shifting from a competitive mentality to an equalizing one uplifts the human spirit and boosts every metric that matters.You can get the first, full two chapters (PDF) of our new, upcoming book, I Am Gravity, plus a strengths and counterfeits fitness check, at https://schoolofgravity.com/. Just tap the purple button at the top of the home page.Learn more about the work we do and the elements of gravity at https://schoolofgravity.com/our-work. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com. Steven Titus Smith, coauthor of I Am Gravity, presented this episode. You can read more about the authors here.Here’s the episode transcript:From the time your alarm clock rings tomorrow morning, you will compete and compare. Depending on how much of a hurry you’re in, you will race for the fastest lane or slip ahead of the next person off the subway. You will compare the idea you shared in your meeting and decide how good it was versus someone else’s. You may hear what salary someone is making and decide how much you’re worth (for everyone, it’s more of course). But it isn’t just at work. You’ve been doing this your entire life. Born, raised, surrounded and submerged in competition and comparison, it isn’t going to stop anytime soon. Bigger house, quicker commute, higher IQ, chicer clothes, better physique, faster car, larger salary, nicer neighborhood, cuter kids, greater market share, bigger titles, bigger promotions, more exotic vacations—it never ends. It’s the current structure of society. There’s no clear case against competition on the surface. Except that the people who race solely to win inevitably lose. The fierce competitor inside you, or one you undoubtedly know, may counter that argument: some people can’t handle competitive pressure. The cutthroat world of competition is the real world we’re in and they better deal with it or deal out. If that’s your belief, grip it tight. Just make sure you know the rules of the game you’re playing and how the score is kept. If you do straightforward, by-the-numbers work that never changes then board the competition ship and sail away. (Sorry, speed away.) However, if you do deeply creative work, or are up against tough intellectual problems where you have to think your way out of questions that don’t always come with scripted answers, then competition fails. Drive author Daniel Pink lays out decades of science that features three elements of creative achievement, none of which have anything to do with competition: autonomy, or the desire to be self-directed; mastery, or the itch to keep working at something that’s meaningful to you; and purpose, creating something transcendent or serves a purpose beyond me. The less-is-more competition story isn’t simply a nice theory that fits only in the land of Weville. A meta-analysis of 265 studies over 56 years found almost no task on which competition beat collaboration. On nearly every financial or performance measure, competition loses. Psychologists Robert Franken’s and Douglas Brown’s work on competitive motivation and achievement found that competitive factors of work tend to be ego-oriented, and clash with traits like hope, optimism and ingenuity. Creative output is 30% higher when a competitive mindset isn’t the center of what drives us. Communication improves by 50%, time to market increases by 35%, and people are 20% more creative. But even staring at the bottom-line data, competition is still standard issue business mentality. “War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing,” wrote PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist Peter Theil. “But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war: allegedly ...
