Hello friend,

I put together some thoughts on competition versus collaboration. I have to say this isn’t by any means a comprehensive list or a systematic approach to the subject. I’m sharing some thoughts and what I encountered, hoping that this would be of use to you.

Speaking from my own experience, competition is good. It motivates you to evolve. I used to feel embarrassed if someone succeeded and I didn’t. If you see others’ success, you are motivated to work towards that success. Or, if you’re not willing to achieve the same type of success and you think that might not be for you, you’re at least heading towards something else. Competing with others makes you active. I don’t know if there are any downsides of competing and comparing yourself to others. Most likely, there are.

Collaboration, on the other hand, helps you be more stable, put systems in place, communicate, and rely on others.

I’ll tell you a little story. We were taught that we should compete with each other (as I briefly mentioned earlier). In school, you compete for better grades, when getting a job you compete to impress the interviewer, and so on. After you land the job, you are still in competition in a way. You want to evolve, you want to be promoted and to be noticed.

This happened to us as well, in a sense. When I say us, I mean me and my wife. After multiple years of working as an employee, my wife decided she’d come and work with me. I was freelancing at that time. Said and done.

Really early, we realized that something wasn’t working well. We were in competition with one another. Why? We somehow wanted to prove the other that we could keep it up. I’m glad we realized this pretty early in the process. After a month or two, we sat down and talked about this.

Back then we learned a very important lesson: pick wisely when and where you should compete and when you should collaborate. Since then, we’ve managed to split the tasks and responsibilities. We learned to work together. We even had some common coding projects along the way, and everything went well. We realized that we’d better collaborate, we’d better work together as a team and not compete with each other, because, in the end, we were working for our common future.

As they say: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Or something along those lines.

If you were to look back at the last couple of years years, I don’t know how, but we were in a tight competition with each other. In those years we were reputable enemies, rather than partners. We live such in blessing times. Just think of the people that lived 100 years ago. We have so much more compared to them. And still, we haven’t fully learned to collaborate.

Competition can be good, as long as you have some well-defined boundaries. You can get your motivation and inspiration from others without hating them. Also, you can compete with yourself. Truth be told, we are our own enemies most of the time.

On the other hand, collaboration is great as well. We were born into communities. We feel better having friends and people around us who can guide us, give advice and spend some precious time with us. Why not learn to work together?

See you soon!