• Worker ants will dig more than three times as much sand per ant when working alongside other ants than when working alone.4
• Weightlifters were able to bench-press more weight when competing against others than when practicing by themselves.5
Healthy rivalry can create the opportunity for innovation, self-improvement, and move the collective forward. It can refine us, challenge us, and reveal our resiliency. It can bring about new inventions and innovations that can change the face of history. From the quest to find a polio vaccine to the race to space, humans accomplish the seemingly impossible when competing in the arena.
Additionally, some of our best leaders are highly competitive people. Having a natural proclivity toward competition doesn’t mean you can’t also be kind, empathetic, and altruistic. These are not mutually exclusive traits. It’s all about keeping those tendencies in check and continuing to put people first.
Competition rightly ordered looks like:
• Never seeking the downfall of others in our own pursuit of success
• Holding steadfast to core values rather than operating from the belief that the ends justify the means
• Doing the right thing, even when it is the hard thing; operating from a place of integrity when competing in the arena
The word “compete” comes from the Latin word competere, which means to strive in common.
What’s interesting is that in classical Latin the word-forming element com- means “with, together” and when followed by the segment -petere signifies “to strive, seek, fall upon, rush at, attack.”6
Even within the structure of the word “compete,” the understanding of togetherness precedes the spirit of rivalry that follows. It is common for people to assume that competition is the antithesis of belonging and cooperation. However, when rightly ordered, the act of competing itself can bring people together.
For example: you can’t have a game without more than one person participating. Whether it is in the economic marketplace or on a sports field, competition requires cooperation and a set of written (or unwritten) rules that all participants are subject to. In team settings, a shared competitive experience can be a catalyst for stronger relationships and a deepening bond.
Whenever I meet another small-business owner, there is an immediate sense of kinship and shared experience. We’ve both taken risks, worked incredibly hard, and fought to turn our passion into a profitable business.
Competition and community are not mutually exclusive ideologies. They coexist and can build upon one another.
THE MATCH
It was the third round of the US Open, and every seat in Arthur Ashe Stadium was ticketed. The lights flickered on as 23,000 tennis fans flooded through the gates of the arena to watch defending champion Naomi Osaka battle fifteen-year-old phenom Coco Gauff.
For many, this match was the highlight of the tournament—a young rising star challenging the reigning champion. It appeared to be an underdog story in the making.
The crowd’s energy was unmistakably in Coco’s favor, but no amount of cheering could replace the phenomenal execution that Naomi brought to the court that evening.
The sixty-five-minute match concluded in a devastating loss for Coco. Fighting back tears, the teenage athlete slowly retreated from the court to undoubtedly cry in the locker room, away from the lights and cameras.
As tradition would have it, the victor would then be given a final moment to shine, taking courtside interviews with reporters and relishing in her success that evening.
However, that is not how this match concluded.
Witnessing the heartbreak of her young rival and seeing the tears rush down her cheeks, Naomi did something remarkable. Instead of walking over to the reporters, she walked back over to Coco and asked her to join the postgame interview.
At first Coco resisted, but Naomi was genuine in her offer. She didn’t want Coco to walk off the court to mourn her loss alone. She instead used her victory to uplift, empower, and celebrate another woman in the arena.
With the world watching, Coco graciously praised Naomi to the applause of the entire stadium. Then Naomi, when it was her time to speak, searched the crowd for Coco’s parents. With emotion in her voice and fighting back tears of her own, she spoke directly to the Gauff family:
“I remember I used to see you guys training in the same place as us, and, for me, the fact that both of us made it, and we’re both still working as hard as we can, it is incredible. I think you guys are amazing, and, Coco, I think you’re amazing.”
In their fiercest season of competition, when the stakes were high and the world was watching, Naomi Osaka used her platform to shine a light on the accomplishments of another woman.
She could have criticized her rival, dismissed the fanfare and sensationalized support for the young star, and shined the spotlight back on herself. As the reigning champion, she had every right to assert her accomplishments and remind the crowd who the best player was that evening… but she chose to take a different path.
Naomi Osaka embraced her success with grace, humility, and empathy—affirming that true champions are not afraid to celebrate the accomplishments of others. She showed the world that being a winner is more about how you treat others than it is about who received the highest score at the end of a match.
In that moment, beneath the stadium lights in Queens, New York, the world witnessed what it looks like when competition is rightly ordered.
On the court, they were competitors.
Off the court, they were community.
Two dualities that coexist in the heart of every athlete—and every human being. The understanding that we can be both competitors and community, in both our personal and professional lives.7
Even in the heat of competition
True champions cheer for others. They acknowledge the courage, tenacity, and resilience it takes to step foot in the arena, and they applaud their rivals who are brave enough to play to win.
True champions embrace competition as a powerful and positive force, but they do not allow that spirit to overtake them. They understand that rivalry is healthy when it does not exceed the boundaries of the game. They put people first—in winning and in losing.
True champions rise to the occasion and empower others to rise alongside them. They use their light to brighten the path for someone else, seeing their success as an opportunity to help others succeed.
True champions look past the score, the accolades, the cheers from the stands—and profoundly desire a better world for those who are coming up behind them.
True champions love competition, they do… but they love people more.
Rising together in a world that pulls us apart requires that competition be rightly ordered. It means putting people first, before opportunity. Cultivating a deeper sense of belonging does not require us to eradicate our desire to strive for success but rather to ensure that we never seek the destruction of others in the process.
We can compete and revel in rivalry, as long as we put our community first. Competition must always remain rightly ordered.
CHAPTER FIVE
MASTERING OUR MINDSETS
Last year, I was doing a podcast interview with a fellow community builder, David Spinks, the founder of CMX, when he asked me a critical question.
How do you navigate building a community for a group that considers each other competitors?
The heart of the work that I do with Rising Tide, after all, is to bring people together who are doing the same jobs in the same local markets and compete for the same pool of resources. In any other context, a group like that would be more likely to fight against one another than fiercely champion each other’s success.
How do we build community in competitive or cutthroat spaces? How do we build a bridge between people who perhaps in any other context would be on opposing sides?
The answer to his question is truthfully quite simple: first we have to change the way we think about one a
nother.
If we want to build communities in competitive environments, we have to shift our mindsets. We need members to understand that they are a part of the same group rather than members of opposing groups. We also need the collective to stop operating from a place of fear and scarcity. We need them to trust and to be trusted in return. If we can do that, we have a fighting chance at turning the tide.
The truth is that mindset is where it all begins. Our brains are powerful. When we believe something, our minds search for evidence to prove ourselves right and diminish evidence that might suggest otherwise. As human beings, we favor information that confirms our existing beliefs.
Psychologists refer to this occurrence as confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is our tendency to search for, interpret, and recall information in a way that strengthens our existing personal beliefs. Essentially, if we believe something to be true, all our experiences in the external world will be interpreted in a manner that reaffirms what we already thought.1
What we believe, we see. What we see, we more strongly believe.
For example, when we view others as competitors, we are more likely to see all of the ways that we are literally and figuratively at odds. We look for and therefore discover evidence indicating that our preconceived notions were in fact true.
They are not friends; they are a threat. They cannot be trusted.
Those competitive thought patterns leave us more likely to behave in a way that brings about further discord. We subconsciously shift our tone, our body language, even our behavior to keep others at arm’s length. We close off. We hide our feelings. We forgo vulnerability.
We avoid cooperation or collaboration in order to protect ourselves. It becomes about “me” and not about “we.”
The same, however, can be said of taking the opposite approach. When we walk into the world with a deep and unrelenting belief that we are part of the same group or family, the evidence we see will only serve to reaffirm that assumption.
We have the power to transform our lives and the lives of others by fighting for community and embracing that we are inherently worthy of love and a collective space to belong. While we can walk into a crowded room and still feel alone, we can also walk into empty spaces and cultivate thriving communities that never existed before.
Our mindset shapes our perception, and our perception leads us toward our reality.
This is why acknowledging that we are community before we are competition (as we discussed in the previous chapter) is just the first step. Once we understand this, we must then identify and fight against the underlying mindsets that pit us against one another in the first place.
We have to challenge internal and external narratives that keep us fighting for our own seat at the table rather than welcoming others to join us. We have to squash the whispers that keep us worried that someone else is bound to steal our joy. We have to eliminate the dialogues that only further polarize and divide the collective into us versus them.
In order to build community where there is currently fierce competition, division, and distrust, we have to reframe the thoughts that we fundamentally believe about one another. We have to shift our perspective.
INNIES AND OUTTIES
At some point in elementary school, I remember being asked a question that completely caught me off guard. I was sitting on the bench beside the blacktop at recess with a friend when out of the blue she asked me, “Are you an innie or an outtie?”
Wait, what? What the heck does she mean? I looked at her and shrugged.
“You know, your belly button. Are you an innie or an outtie?”
Oh! My belly button!
Before that moment I had never categorized anyone based on their belly button. Truthfully, I hadn’t given belly buttons a whole lot of thought at all.
However, my friend’s question made me realize something… something that to my baby brain was mind-blowing. There are two types of people in the world: those with belly buttons that go in and those with belly buttons that stick out.
It’s kind of a bizarre thing if you think about it.
“I’m an innie,” I responded.
She smiled. “Me too.”
I guess that made us part of the same team.
The act of creating groups and assigning membership based on similarities and differences is something that we do extremely well as a species.
Why are we this way? One theory is that our early humans lived in small social groups that were frequently in conflict with other groups. It was evolutionarily functional for our ancestors to distinguish members of other groups as different and potentially dangerous.2 As a result, our brains became efficient at making these distinctions in order to keep us safe from harm.
Psychologists and sociologists understand this behavior through the lens of ingroups and outgroups, a construct most deeply attributed to social identity theory and popularized by the work of Henri Tajfel. Human beings are wired with an ability to quickly identify to which groups we belong and to which we do not.3
Where others fall along these boundaries is important to our understanding of whether a person is “one of us” or “one of them.”
For example, people who share traits, associations, or belief systems with us are part of our ingroup. People who do not share those traits, associations, or belief systems are part of the outgroup.
In the case of my friend and her peculiar question, we were both part of the same ingroup with our “innie” belly buttons. And anyone with an “outtie” was… well, in the relative outgroup. They were not “one of us.”
Where people fall within social group boundaries has an impact on how we think about and treat them. For example, we have a tendency to prefer and respond more favorably to people who are members of our own social group through a practice known as ingroup favoritism. Additionally, we tend to see people who belong to the same social group as more similar than they are in reality, and we tend to judge people from different social groups as more different from us than they are in reality.4
These psychological boundaries have a significant impact on how we view ourselves and others, often with negative consequences. Social categorization can establish and exacerbate divisions unnecessarily, fanning the flames of “us” versus “them” and ultimately keeping members of different groups from trusting one another. They can lead to biases, prejudices, and stereotypes. We’ve all experienced this in some aspect of our lives.
However, this isn’t how it has to be.
The thing that is most fascinating about ingroup and outgroup boundaries is that they are completely arbitrary and therefore can be artificially constructed or changed. They are real to us because we believe that they are.
For example, psychologists have determined that ingroup favoritism occurs even on the basis of unimportant or irrational groupings (like whether people “overestimate” or “underestimate” the number of dots shown on a display or even on the basis of a completely random coin toss).5
Or in the case of being an “innie” or an “outtie,” I had never divided people based on the appearance of their belly button until I became aware of those groupings in the first place.
The most powerful fact in all of this remains that social groups exist simply because we perceive those groups as existing in the first place.6
Therefore, redefining our perception of who belongs to our social group and broadening our psychological boundaries has the potential to transform how we view and ultimately treat one another. If ingroups are malleable and expandable, we have the ability to build bridges over the divides that once separated us.
It’s like changing my friend’s question from “Are you an innie or an outtie?” to “Do you have a belly button or not?” Ingroups are capable of broadening when we change the boundaries.
Let’s return to David’s original question. How did we do it? How did we build a community for a group that considered one another competitors?
In the cas
e of navigating the division caused by competition, this means shifting our mindset to see all members as a part of the same community rather than individual competitors pitted against one another.
A few ways to achieve this mindset shift include:
• Increasing the perception of similarity among members
• Finding common ground or the space that overlaps between opposing forces
• Working to solve a shared problem (that ideally can only be solved together)
INCREASING THE PERCEPTION OF SIMILARITIES
Increase the perception of similarity among members by defining and consistently communicating what they share. Language is one of the most powerful ways to accomplish this.
For Rising Tide, this meant building our community around the collective identity of small-business ownership and uniting members around our shared core values. We intentionally chose language that acted like an identity umbrella where all members could see themselves reflected underneath.
For example, we use phrases like “creative entrepreneurs” and “small-business owners” when referring to members rather than listing out industry verticals. This creates a collective identity where different individuals (photographers, marketing strategists, graphic designers, and makers) are all united together.
FINDING COMMON GROUND
In the context of cultivating community, finding common ground or the space that overlaps between opposing forces means concentrating on the areas of agreement, interest, and value where we can collectively benefit.
Start by asking these questions:
• What are the areas where all members can agree? (Think about interests, struggles, hopes for the future.)
• How can we concentrate on those areas of common ground and build conversation and value around those topics?
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