How to Harness Your Competitiveness for Long-term Dominance

During a particularly difficult track workout with my girlfriend the other day, I noticed I was struggling to keep pace with her.

We enjoy exercising together. We are also competitive people, but we rarely let that trait fire up too much with each other. Sometimes she wins, sometimes I win, but we almost always enjoy the workout and the time spent together.

Nonetheless, spending the whole workout several strides behind her started to get in my head.

“How would my effort differ if I were exercising with anyone else?” I wondered. Given my competitive nature, I would probably drain everything in the tank to bury my workout partner.

After I reached this conclusion, I began to wonder if that is the most effective strategy.

Somewhere around the third set of stadium stairs, I concluded it is not.

When does a competitive nature help?

A competitive nature does you little good if you only exercise it in the heat of battle. Where it benefits you most is in the preparation.

A strategy I like to call “harnessed competitiveness” is one in which a competitive nature will make you great.

Harnessed competitiveness requires planning. It requires strategizing, and it requires calculation. It requires you to take your deep desire to win and focus it like a laser on the feat you wish to accomplish.

Maybe you want to run that mile faster than your workout partner. Or maybe you want to negotiate a better deal than your colleague.

These accomplishments are won in the background - in the quiet moments where you choose to run a few more sprints, or where you spend another hour talking through a mock negotiation.

Visualize losing, feel how much it will hurt, and use that feeling to keep you there a little longer, preparing a little harder, being just a bit more disciplined.

This is where competitiveness pays dividends – as the gasoline on the fire of discipline, not as the pump-up music played when you enter the arena.

How to apply the strategy

Let’s look at one practical example of how you might apply this strategy.

Say you’re playing in a weekly pick-up basketball league. Maybe you’re a decent athlete, but basketball isn’t your best sport.

Your outward competitiveness shows in your hustle after loose balls and your dogged persistence on defense, but these skills alone don’t let you dominate the league. Enter, harnessed competitiveness:

Step One

Identify your weaknesses. Maybe all your turnovers are from sloppy ball handling, you’re getting out-rebounded by guys the same height as you, and you miss every baseline shot you take.

Now you have some valuable information.

Step Two

Develop a plan of action. Based on the weaknesses you identified in step one, you decide to do the following:

• 15 minutes of dribbling drills, three times each week.

• 25 baseline jump shots from each side of the basket after every game.

• Add a 10 minute plyometric jump workout to your gym routine, twice each week.

Step Three

Use the pain of getting beat to stay disciplined. Every time you want to cut your dribbling drills short, think of the turnovers you had last game.

When you finish your game at 11pm on a Tuesday night, you’ll probably want to skip your baseline jumpers. Remember the shots you missed.

And when you think your legs are too tired to bust out your plyo workout, don’t forget how it felt to get out-rebounded by Kevin from accounting.

Any fool can claim he is competitive and fight like a cornered animal for a near term victory. His competitiveness lies in his ego.

It takes a disciplined strategist and a winner to harness competitiveness and use it for repeated dominance.

The winner’s competitiveness may not show on the surface. He might not be called “competitive” because he doesn’t demonstrate it outwardly.

But it will manifest in the little smirk he shoots your way after crushing you in the race, stealing your client, or taking your job.

Anyone can be competitive, not everyone can harness competitiveness.Which person will you be?