Watching the summer Olympics in London provides participants and spectators alike an intense experience of competition and almost an obsession with winning. Many a competing athlete defines success as winning the gold and anything else as failure. Does an excessive focus on winning actually produce negative results?
For decades, psychologists have noted an irony in elite athletic competition: If you set aside the happy people who win gold and look only at the people who come in second and third, it's the men and women with bronze medals who invariably look happier than the athletes who won silver.
Winning is an outcome. However, when people become obsessed with outcomes, they can lose sight of the journey, lose sight of who they are and how they got there, lose appreciation for the value of people who don't win.
We are obsessed with winning at everything. Often at any cost. It translates from the war rooms to the athletic fields to the top of the corporate ladder. Business language is infused with the vocabulary of the locker room and battlefield. They battle to win in a competitive market and dominate the opposition with an aggressive plan, sometimes "destroying their opponents."
We think we will always remember the great achievers, the gold medal winners for all time. Yet a survey of people asked to recall the gold medalists for the 400 meter race at the Olympics since 1991 will give you few correct answers.
Unlike Carl Lewis and Daley Thompson, Derek Redmond is not a name that conjures up memories of Olympic gold medals. But it is Redmond who defines the essence of the human spirit. Redmond arrived at the 1992 Olympic Summer Games in Barcelona determined to win a medal in the 400. The color of the medal was meaningless; he just wanted to win one. Just one. Down the backstretch, only 175 meters away from finishing, Redmond is a shoo-in to make the finals.
Suddenly, he heard a pop in his right hamstring. He pulls up lame, as if he had been shot. As the medical crew arrives, Redmond tells them, "I'm going to finish my race." Then in a moment that will live forever in the minds of millions of people since then, Redmond lifted himself up, and started hobling down the track. His father raced out of the stands, and helped his son cross the finish line to the applause of 65,000 people. Redmond did not win a medal, but he won the hearts of people that day and thereafter. To this day, people, when asked about the race, mention Redmond, and can't name the medal winners.
Our obsessive focus on winning in our culture to some degree reflects our belief that competition is good and the best way to gauge the value of our individual and collective enterprise, particularly in relation to business.
Recent research has shown a clear relationship between levels of happiness and competition. According to a comparative study of 42 nations around the world by Evert Van de Vliert and Onne Janseen, published in the Journal of Comparative Social Science, happiness decreases as the level of competition increases in a given society.
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