Healthy competition is good for improvement

Life is a race, and in a race, everyone wants to be the winner, and that means we need to compete with others if we want to be winners in life. Competition or race starts from the day we come into the world, and it will continue till the end of our lives. I mean, death is the only way to finish the race. At the beginning, the concept of competition is introduced to us through our parents because they want us to compare ourselves with others and want us to be better than our peers. And when we later apply to an educational institution, the official competition begins from there.

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Most parents want to see their kids doing better compared to their peers, which is a very common expectation, and I think they can expect it as the well-wishers of their children. But the issue is their mindset. They mostly want it to show other parents how much better their kids are compared to others and how, as parents, they have done better compared to other parents. Some parents don’t even care about the improvement of their kids as long as their kids can beat others in results. It’s called the unhealthy competition, and parents are the ones who introduce the unhealthy competition to their kids’s minds because they want to show off their superiority as parents. This kind of competition brings jealousy among kids. In the beginning, it may help to grow faster, but with time, it will be a headache as parents expectations increase and create mental pressure on kids.

Since our childhood time, we have been continuously competing with others, and most of our competitions are unhealthy competitions, and those are harmful to us. It’s not necessary that we win every time because we can’t be good at every challenge. There is always someone better than us, and that’s the truth. When we are not the winners, it backfires on us and makes us mentally exhausted. It can break our confidence and willpower to move forward. People judge us as losers, and we need to face it. It’s the way people judge others. If we are winners, they praise us too much, and if we are losers, they don’t hesitate to blame us and come forward to give us lectures like they are experts. In an unhealthy competition, competitors care too much about others judgment, and that’s why they receive a backlash when they are not winners.

Does it mean competition is a bad thing? I don’t think it’s a bad thing if we can use it in better ways. We can use it to improve ourselves. We just need to have a positive mindset to make it possible. Competition should be healthy competition, and, in that case, there is no existence of jealousy. In such a case, we need to compete with others for sure because we want to improve ourselves like those who are better than us. We compete to improve ourselves, not to show others our superiority. In a healthy competition, the judgment of people is not a matter of concern, even if we become losers, but some judgment of people can be taken as a suggestion. We can ignore those people who try to blame us for losing. It’s a matter of improving ourselves, and so what other people think should not matter to us. Healthy competition says if we lose, we need to improve and try our best to win next time, and we can be winners rather than feeling disappointed. In that case, we need to see winners as inspiration rather than feeling jealous towards them.

I know that competing with ourselves is the best and most healthy competition, and at some point, it can be acceptable, but there are limitations, too. We can be good; we may not be so good like others in that case. If we only compete with ourselves, our growth won’t be fast; it would be if we competed with those people who are superior and better than us. Competing with strong opponents is much better than only competing with ourselves because in that case, our speed of growth increases, and obviously, the growth must be better than competing with ourselves.