One morning, during my junior year of high school, I was sitting in class (a web design class, interestingly enough) finishing up an assignment and conversing with a classmate. I don’t remember what the conversation was about, nor whether it was even so much a conversation as a one-sided rant, but one comment in particular from him stuck out, and I remember it to this day. I don’t even remember the exact quote, but the general idea is this:

Our planet wouldn’t be so jacked up if people were content to be just as good as everyone else. The problem is that everybody wants to be better than everyone else, and they end up screwing each other over.

American culture encourages greatness. It encourages us to be the best, to be champions, to be stars. American culture wants us to be #1. Not tied for #1 - no, that’s not good enough. When’s the last time you saw two competing countries share a gold medal in an Olympic sport? When’s the last time you heard of a tie for a Grammy award? Not a chance; in the Olympics, a second-place contestant will get a silver medal and a bit of recognition to encourage them to come back in four years. Second-place Hollywood stars don’t even get that.

Greatness in itself is not problematic at all; there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to be the best, right? Of course not - the problem comes in when we forget about a very simple concept: Every “best” implies that there is a “worst”. And people don’t like being the worst. People don’t like putting in time and effort only to earn very little, if any, return. In short, we have two competing ideas:

1) We invest large amounts of time and effort into becoming the “best”, and we expect to be compensated for this investment.
2) Others invest large amounts of time and effort into becoming the “best”, and also expect to be compensated for this investment.

Let’s use an example to make this a bit more concrete. We’ll say that Company A and Company B (creative names, huh?) are competing for sales among a group of consumers. To do this, they spend a certain amount of money on advertising, in hopes of making the largest positive return that they can. Company A spends $300 on advertising but sells only $200 of product, for a $100 net loss. Company B, meanwhile, spends $400 and sells $600, for a $200 profit. In this scenario, Company B grows, squashes Company A out of business, etc. etc. We’ll assume that Company B keeps its advertising budget and steals the sales from Company A, resulting in a $400 profit. Somebody wins, somebody else loses.

Let’s say now that Company A and Company B merge… into Company AB. (Never mind that it will eventually be broken up by anti-monopoly laws.) With proper cooperation, the combined brains of the two marketing departments are able to come up with a campaign costing only $300, but which nets $1000 in sales, resulting in a $700 profit. You might argue that, because the two companies merged, each company’s profit is actually around $350 - and you would be correct. On a very small (and very simplified) scale, competition doesn’t seem all that bad. It’s not until we step out and look from a global perspective that cooperation really starts to make sense…

The problem with competition (we’re talking broadly, not from the business perspective) is very simple, yet often overlooked: Someone’s effort ends up being wasted. While in some cases - the business world being one - competition appears beneficial, from the perspective of global progress, competition is simply too inefficient.

The Cold War is an excellent example of pointless competition. The United States and the USSR were developing state-of-the-art space and weaponry technology… yet much of that development was geared toward threatening each other. Where would we be today if the two countries had put that time and money into jointly improving a worldwide space exploration program?

When we focus our efforts in one direction instead of wasting our time competing with one another, no matter what the project, we’re bound to make much greater progress. Instead of thinking, “How can I do better?” try thinking…

“How can we do better?”

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