Exploring The Shift
The shift is not a thing. It is the action of discovering Self.

I just found an interesting post in Matt Heaton's Blog. Matt is the CEO of the company which hosts this website and I like his candidness and style. If you ever need web hosting, make sure you take Bluehost into consideration, if for nothing else, then for the honesty in one of his earlier blog post.

However in this particular post about winners and losers Matt shares his thoughts about his son's boy scout pinewood derby race and about the fact that they did not make it an actual race, i.e. that there was no over all winner.

One thing he didn’t learn was how to be a winner or a loser. To make all the cub scouts feel good about the event they no longer have 1st, 2nd, etc. Instead the scouts race their cars many times and have a good time, but no one wins. The same is true for my other son’s baseball games. He is only 7, but they don’t allow the teams to keep score for his basketball team or his baseball team.

Then he says:

Life is about successes and failures, and both are very useful. We don’t learn to do better until we first learn that we didn’t do good enough the first time. It bothers me immensely when society tries to teach us that it is bad to win if someone has to lose.

Just think if I told our hosting customers that we made a good effort on giving you good hosting platform, but it might not work, but we hope it does. That attitude would put us out of business in a month.

The post made me aware how much I have changed over the last years. I used to be a quite competitive person, there was hardly anything I did where I did not draw some value from being better. In some cases it worked, in others it didn't and I drew a lot of motivation from striving to become better than others. But in that way I could never be good enough and only after reading Elias I did understand how hurful to myself that was and how unnecessary.

I think the pinewood derby is a good example for this and also Matt's comment about his business. He says that the boy scounts had a good time runnig their races, so why chalk up scores to make an over all winner? The bad thing about competitions is that there's only one winner and so many losers and I really see no point in that kind of comparison anymore.

Likewise with the business. I'm running a business myself, so I know success and failiure, but I do not think that pitting my products against others does much for that. There is no best terminal emulator (the main product of my business), there's no best house, best coke, or best pizza and I think there's no best webhoster or best pinewood car also. If the boys' cars didnt work, fell off the track or lost a wheel, that would prove as enough impetus to do better next time and I think the same would be true to Matt's web hosting company. I agree that an approach to web hosting as he describes it would put him out of business quite quickly, but I also think that you can create an excellent company without comparing it to others.

You probably all know those rankings and how they differ, depending on who does them. The key word there may be comparison and comparion depends on how you measure.

To compare you will need critiera and I do not believe in absolute criteria anymore. In case of the pinewood cars, speed may be relatively easy to measure but I'd consider that quite superficial and if I were a teacher who presented such a project to kids, I'd see many areas where they would benefit from building such a car, like learning to handle tools, inspire them to practice creativity and to spend time with their dads or even to learn physical principles. None of those can be measured by speed and I'm sure these points are accomplished without making it an overall competition. In fact, those who would lose would most likely consider the project a failiure even if they excelled in all those other areas.

The only point I'd see in making a tournament would be, that for the losers the parents would have an opportunity to point out all the other areas where the kids succeeded and how important it is to not live by other people's criteria.

For what it is worth, getting rid of most of the ideas of comparism and competition is one of the most beneficial and self empowering accomplishments in my life so far.

UPDATE: Matt just made a new and seemingly unrelated blog post about changing the game, which I think ties into this earier one quite nicely. I'll leave it everybody to draw your own conclusions.