It feels like everything is about winning these days. No matter what you’re doing, it’s all about whether you win or lose, as if that’s the true and only mark of how good you are, or how much your efforts really matter.
I don’t mean just sports and elections here, but literally everything. Even artists and musicians who’ve devoted their lives to crafts that cannot be objectively measured now go head to head on an endless stream of competition shows. Learning happens on clever apps where you score as many points as you can while you acquire skills and knowledge along the way. I see lots of value in this, I’ve experienced the value. The drive to win can propel us to be our best, and it can make things more fun too. But I also think it’s gone too far, at times way too far, and I believe humanity suffers when too much of our worldview is fixated on winning.
Some examples immediately spring to mind, like the non-stop hunt to figure out who the greatest of all time is at any given endeavor. As much as this might be a wonderful honor for the Lionel Messis of the world, I don’t like how it influences how our kids feel about success. It’s no longer enough to be good and hard working, let alone a great player who continually lifts up their team. Now we’ve shifted the focus to the biggest win of all, being better than anyone who’s ever walked the earth.
A player has a dominant season and leads their team to a championship. Once we’ve celebrated that for about five minutes we’re moving on to investigate if they’ve in fact truly won everything. Are they the most valuable player in the league? Has their career performance earned them a place in the hall of fame? And finally, are they the greatest of all time? If not, let’s knock them down a peg right away and put them in their place. Let’s move the goal posts on their behalf so it’s clear there are still battles in which they need to claim victory before we can fully honor their accomplishments.
And then there’s gamification. Does everything need to be a game in which we have winners and losers? In sports I can understand it because at least there’s a scoring system and rules. (For now let’s look past the fact that rules in sports are never followed perfectly, there’re plenty of judgment calls by the referees, and there’s also a ton of luck involved, especially when you have two evenly matched teams; the way the ball bounces can play a huge role in determining the winner.) But now the whole world is gamified, even all the stuff you can’t really measure, like cooking, lego building, singing, glass blowing, and the list goes on and on.
These competition shows are great by the way (I absolutely love The Great British Baking Show). They’re entertaining and inspiring, and they push the skills of the contestants to show us what’s possible. But there are also side effects. As winning becomes the focus, there’s less joy involved, more stress, and sometimes it’s all stress and no joy. This rubs off on the viewers. Is it good enough to casually enjoy cooking anymore? Not to some, whose aspirations become more intense and complex with every meal, always wanting to take it to the next level. Doing amazing things like this is wonderful, it really is, but so is macaroni and cheese. Let’s not overlook life’s simple pleasures as we pursue greatness. We don’t always need to one up ourselves and everyone else. It’s okay to just do what we like, what we enjoy.
Let’s also recognize that you can game a gamified system. You can choose to do whatever it takes to win, even if that’s not really the goal. With learning games you can score a lot more points by answering the easy questions but then you don’t learn much at all. In competitions you can exploit loopholes in the rules to beat the other team but then it’s no longer a true test of who’s best. Doesn’t that matter?
The way that winning has taken over American politics also disgusts me. The partisanship and the overblown anger are absurd and distasteful but more than anything it’s the fact that our leaders aren’t leading through compromise. The whole premise of our system of government is finding the right balance between the different ways people lead their lives and pursue happiness. If one group is too focused on winning they’re going against the larger goal of making this a place where we can peacefully co-exist. You can’t win everything if you need to leave space for others to win their fair share too. Compromise achieves that. So does the golden rule. But that’s not what our politicians are playing for anymore. Every issue is seen as a must-win battle to the death, and that way of being hurts us all, even when we’re victorious.
On the other hand, winning is critical when good and evil are actually at play (in politics this is typically not the case, even though we’re constantly told otherwise). In fights over human rights it’s so important that good wins and I hope we all join the righteous cause. Losing to the haters out there is bad for the human race because we increase needless suffering in the world, we deny people respect and dignity, we falsely hold onto the idea that some are superior to others.
With almost everything else out there I hope we learn to put less emphasis on winning. Don’t get me wrong, I hope you win your high school championship game, but if you tried your best and worked your ass off I’m proud of you, full stop. For all the folks that think you’ve failed I hope you don’t listen to them.
In the grand scheme life is infinitely complex and driven by more forces than we can comprehend, the substantial majority of which are beyond our control. There are biological forces, structural forces, cosmic forces, spiritual forces, atmospheric forces, and so many others, leaving just some space, but not much, for our free will.
Winning simply doesn’t equate to being your best. Both could happen at the same time, but they’re not the same thing. Winning and being right aren’t synonymous either.
I’m not free of this obsession with winning by any means. I’m more competitive than I like to admit. Not nearly as much as when I was younger, but at certain things I still really want to win and be recognized as the winner. In business I want to win market share and beat the competition, and I also want to be seen as someone who’s relevant and accomplished and influential. I’d love my artistic efforts, like my writing, to be admired and ideally get published by winning the subjective contests in the minds of editors as they determine which stories are best. I also have a tortured relationship with the Buffalo Bills that’s unfortunately all about winning. I’m only happy when they win. I don’t enjoy the games otherwise.
But I’ve gotten better at this and I want to get better still. In business I honestly only want to win by delivering great projects and services that actually improve the communities we serve while not harming the rest of the world. Winning in business any other way doesn’t interest me much at all. With my writing I’m now focused on expressing myself truthfully and writing pieces I enjoy, regardless of what others think. With the Bills I’m still struggling to find a better path, but at least I’m honest with myself about it. I might never get over my need for the Bills to win, but maybe I can at least find more peace. Perhaps I’ll stop watching the games and save myself the roller coaster of emotions that overtake my Sundays. I’ll figure something out.
I think the same should be true of everything. If winning is important to us, we should be adamant about doing it in a way that doesn’t hurt ourselves or humanity in other ways.
I think mostly of my kids here. They’re young but they’re also smart and balanced and have their hearts in the right place. I want them to be happy and content with their lives, but I’m concerned about all the societal pressure. It can be so hard to find happiness if you feel the only way to get there is to win.
So is winning important? In some cases it definitely is, but in most it’s not. And I think we’d all be better off if we stopped caring so much about winning and instead focused on loving ourselves and our loved ones for exactly who we are. We’re already enough.