What we do these days involves competition. No matter what. A a kid we race to the gate and back. As teens we race our bikes. As adults we race against time and colleagues. The time that we live in Competition is viewed as the source of creativity and self improvement. As a kid we are expected to be the top scorer in the class, not the smartest, as teens we are expected to be responsible but not creative and as the workforce we are expected to bring in profit and not innovation.
Why does competition has to be so bad? Slowly but steadily everyone starts to keeps expectations out of you and keeps reminding you about that. You fall victim to it losing your creativity. Its because we want to beat that record and get our names in there. We benchmark every thing everyday, we fall into The Curse of Great Expectation.
But what about creativity? If i have ever done anything that is creative or innovated an idea, its because i didn’t take part in a race. On the same grounds i hate taking exams too. Exams for me is again about breaking records and false derivatives. With time being most valued, exams seems to be the only way people want to find talents.
There is a trend with the organizations now. They are still competing and very much in the race. They do it in more ‘innovative’ ways. They ask you to just innovate and come up with some thing very brilliant. Even if you didn’t mean that to be part of any race or drive the race. Its used by the organization to outrun their competitor.
The human cost to win the organization’s race or the cost of health on onself is often disregarded. But what happens to those who stay out of the competition and decide to be .. uhh .. say free. They have immense potential to be creative and inventive. But why don’t they?.
The Society is stereotyped in believing that competing is the best way to progress. So much of the things that these so called ‘free birds’ innovate are considered inferior. They eventually gets into the race to survive or fall.
I knew of a person during my college days. He was this extra brilliant guy. There wasn’t much that he couldn’t answer about technology. Few professors realized his potential. But but the rest of the folks were unforgiving. Had the mentoring right he wouldn’t had to settle for a rather uhhh normal techie kind of job with an average company.
Its time we wake up to say no to the unwanted competitions around us.
The very first white-paper i wrote was christened – “How to extend your tea-breaks using Scripting“. Introduction started of like this -
