درسنامه اصلی

Competition – Main Lesson

Hi, I’m AJ Hoge and welcome to our new lesson.

At the beginning of this summer, I felt lazy, physically lazy. I had just returned from Spain, from a wonderful, in fact, two-month trip to Spain. But back in the United States all my motivation was gone.

I didn’t want to work. I didn’t want to exercise. You know, I just wanted to think about Spain and remember the trip, but I had no motivation for anything else.

Now, I was in great shape at the time. In Spain I had been walking every single day, like six to eight hours a day carrying a backpack, hiking.

So I started back in the United States in great shape, great physical fitness. But week by week my physical fitness got worse and worse, because I was so lazy.

I’d wake up in the morning and think ah, I should exercise, I should do something. I tried to push myself, force myself to do it but eh, just I didn’t want to do it, I just felt lazy, I didn’t want to do it. I couldn’t force myself to do it and so I’d just eat breakfast and then go and sit in a coffee shop all day.

And this repeated day after day after day, and of course, my fitness level dropped and dropped and dropped and, of course, as my fitness level dropped, I got even more lazy, downward spiral.

It seemed hopeless, but while I was at the coffee shop looking online, just playing around, I came across a website for this stick fighting.

It’s this group that, actually a group I had belonged to many years ago, 20 years ago, where they put on helmets and padding and armor and then they use sticks and they hit each other with the sticks and they fight, they have fights with these sticks.

And uh, I don’t know, for some reason I thought oh that sounds fun. I should do that again. I haven’t done something like that in a long time, and I thought oh, I should do it again. So I went to the website and then I found the local group.

Now at the time we were in Indiana, the state where my sister lives, we were staying with my sister, so my wife and I, we went to a meeting of this group. And uh, we also went to watch a couple of their fighting practices, and as I watched I got more excited, I said, “Oh that looks so fun. That’s great. I want to do it.”

But something else happened as I watched.

As I watched I realized, oh my God, these guys are big and strong and fast, and they’re hitting each other quite hard. Even though they’re wearing padding and armor, I knew it would be painful.

Because I could remember from 20 years ago it’s painful when you get hit by a stick full force, even with the padding. So then I started to get a little scared, because I knew, wow, if I do this, I have to compete against these guys and most of these guys are bigger and stronger than I am.

I decided, “Well, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna do it. It looks fun. It’s a great opportunity to meet new people and I remember enjoying it so much so why not, I’m gonna do it.”

So we went home and the next morning I woke up and I started thinking about exercising again, but this time I remembered the fighting practice, the stick fighting. And I remembered the big guys and how strong they were, and I thought, “Oh, if I’m gonna compete against these guys, if I’m gonna fight against them, I need to be stronger and faster.”

And so that morning I got up and I started doing kettle bells. It’s this kind of, looks like a cannon ball, a big iron ball with a handle. I started doing these swings with it and lifting them to get stronger. I did some push-ups. I did some pull-ups. The next morning, I did the same thing.

The next morning, I did the same thing.

Then I started thinking about the actual fighting and the skills, and I thought, “Ah, how can I improve my skills so that when I fight these big strong guys, I’ll be good, I can compete against them. I can beat them.”

And I thought, “Well, maybe boxing, while boxing is kind of similar, maybe if I practice some boxing skills, I could use that with the stick fighting too, similar footwork similar movements.”

So I did, I started to practice boxing skills in the morning also. I got some DVDs for boxing, so I woke up every morning I did push-ups, I did pull-ups, I did the kettle bells and then after that I started working on boxing skills, and then I got a stick and I tried to use the boxing techniques, but with a stick instead.

And so then for the next several weeks I exercised more and more and harder and harder and I got stronger and stronger and stronger, and I got faster and my technique improved more and more and more.

Why did I do it? Competition. It was the idea of competing against people bigger and stronger than me. That’s what pushed me and why suddenly I got all of that incredible motivation to exercise, to get stronger, to become more fit; competition.

Nowadays especially, competition is often viewed or described as being negative, right? I notice in the media a lot that it’s all about cooperation. Cooperation or in books: cooperation is so wonderful, oh we need to all cooperate.

And, indeed, cooperation is wonderful. Indeed, we need, we absolutely need cooperation in our life. We need to work with other people and cooperate with them together, it’s helpful and wonderful to work with other people towards a shared goal to overcome shared obstacles and problems. Cooperation is indeed fantastic.

But! Just because cooperation is great doesn’t mean that competition is bad. It doesn’t mean it’s automatically bad to compete against other people, and in fact, it’s not bad. It’s natural.

Competition is good. Competition is completely natural, in fact, there’s no way to avoid it. As a living being there’s no way to avoid it. Competition is part of being alive on this planet, right?

It’s the story of evolution, for example, different species competing for the same resources. Human beings have always competed against each other; in sports, in games, in business, individuals, groups, teams, governments, competition is everywhere. It’s nothing to fear. It’s a positive force. It can make us stronger and better.

In my example, right, I was lazy, I couldn’t get myself motivated. It was the competition that motivated me. Because of that potential competition, not even actual competition, just potential competition energized me to get stronger and more fit and more healthy.

It was a very positive force for me. Competition, in fact, has tremendous benefits, we just need to look at competition in the right way. The problem is, too many people look at competition as a negative, stressful thing, where, “Oh they’re trying to beat me and oh eh,” and they focus too much on the other person, on the opponent.

And then they get stressed out, they feel bad and then they decide, “Competition’s a bad thing, I don’t like it.” That’s terrible. It’s not the right way to view it.

There’s a much more positive beneficial way to look at competition. We can look at it in a very positive way, as something that is extremely beneficial to us as individuals and indeed to human society as a whole.

What are the benefits, the huge big benefits of competition?

Number one is self-improvement.

Competition naturally pushes us to improve ourselves. When I thought about fighting against those bigger, stronger guys, I realized I need to get stronger. So the competition pushed me to improve myself.

In business, competition pushes all the competitors, all the businesses in an industry to improve. They’re always trying to get better than each other and as a result they keep improving.

The opposite we see in some places, in some parts of the world, in some industries where there’s not competition or there’s low competition, then you get monopolies or you just get a couple companies dominating. What happens?

Everything gets worse. Without competition, they’re not forced to improve. Without competition, they’re not forced to be good to their customers. So what do they do? They raise their prices. Their service becomes worse and worse and worse. It’s horrible for customers.

Competition in business is a good thing for most of us. So self-improvement- competition, is a powerful motivator for self-improvement.

Teamwork is another powerful benefit of competition. Competition can pull people together. Competition can actually encourage cooperation. Right?

Think of sports teams, especially good high-quality sports teams.. Without competition they don’t have much reason to work together. They don’t have much reason to cooperate, to help each other.

But when they have to face a tough opponent, the whole team will come together stronger. Because they know, to beat the other opponent they have to be stronger. They have to work together better. They have to have better cooperation or else they will lose against the other team.

So, in an interesting way competition encourages cooperation. Competition encourages better teamwork and creates stronger teams.

Another great, huge benefit of competition is that it increases productivity, it gets us to do more work in a shorter time.

It’s easy to become lazy if you’re not competing with anyone. It’s easy to sit on your hands, we say, right? It means you’re sitting on your hands, if you’re sitting on your hands, you can’t do work.

It’s easy to do that if there’s no one else to compete against, no one else who’s pushing you. That’s what happened with me and my fitness level during the early summer.

No one was pushing me at all. I had nothing, it was quite easy just to wake up in the morning and be lazy. But, when I was faced with potential competition, suddenly I had to be productive. Like, oh wow, every day I need to work. I need to get more done.

It’s the same in business. So it can make us more productive. We get more, well, we get more done and we get more useful things done when we’re faced with competition.

These are great things. They make our lives better.

Another story, this is a very personal story for me. My own company, Effortless English, faces competition and it faces some competition that is particularly negative.

What I’ve found, after Effortless English became famous and very successful around the world, something happened. Other English teachers started to copy me.

I noticed that other websites started popping up and they copied me, I mean, almost exactly. I would read their websites and it sounds, they read or they sounded like they just copied and pasted from my website.

I mean, the phrases, the actual words they chose sounded exactly the same as my own website. They copied my style of teaching.

That’s right, these copycat competitors, at first, upset me tremendously. I was like, “God what is it, these guys, what’s wrong with them? Are they creative? Can’t they create their own method? Can’t they write their own website? Why do they have to copy me?”

And I got very upset by the competition and especially the copying, upset me tremendously. It felt like I did all this work myself and now all these people are competing and copying me, and trying to steal from me. It upset me quite a lot, for a while.

But then, after I got angry and upset, I started to work harder. I started to realize, well, if they’re copying everything I’m doing now, trying to be the same as me, I need to keep improving. I need to be more creative. I need to innovate, so that I’m always ahead of them, I’m always doing something different, always doing something a little new.

I need better skills. I need to be a better communicator. I need to be a better public speaker. I need to be a better storyteller. I need to develop my voice more.

I need to be more emotional. I need to use my body in a more effective way. I need to get on bigger stages and speak to more people. I need to write a book and then more books.

And so all those copycat competitors, who at first upset me and made me quite angry, ended up pushing me to be more innovative. Pushing me to continue improving, because the truth was, I was getting a little bit lazy, right?

Effortless English was very successful. It had become quite famous, so it would have been easy for me just to keep doing exactly the same thing forever. But, the competition, the copycats pushed me. I realized, “Nah, I can’t keep doing that cause they’re just gonna keep copying me, so I want to stay ahead of them.”

I want to keep improving, and then I realized, you know, this is better for me anyway it’s not just about the competition. I want to continue improving. I want to continue trying new things. I want to become better and better and get more skills, and continue to innovate.

And so I started working on all these different skills, especially public speaking and storytelling.

And then I realized, “Ah, I should focus on pronunciation. I can teach learners how to speak English with better pronunciation. That’s a whole new thing. I’ve never taught that before.”

So I learned how to teach that and developed my own method for that. And then I thought, well, companies always want me to speak to them and help them, so I can develop a program and a course specifically for companies. And I’m doing that right now.

I can do the movie technique. Students love the movie technique. I’ll start doing lessons using movies.

All of these changes happened because of the competition.

So let’s talk about the keys. How can you use competition in a positive way? And you should. You can’t avoid it. You’re always going to be competing in some way.

So you might as well do it in a way that’s positive and have a positive attitude about it. When you do that, you get great benefits.

Okay, number one with competition. Focus mostly on yourself or your team, not on the competition.

This is a hard one, right? Because when someone starts competing with us, if it’s a sports thing like boxing or something, well, you have your opponent. In business you have your other businesses that are competing with you, whatever it is in life.

And it’s easy, it’s easy, to put all of your focus on them, right? What are they doing?

What are they doing next? What are they going to try to do? How are they copying me? Are they cheating or not?

And to be focused, focused, focused outwardly, but that doesn’t benefit you really. The truth is that competitor, they’re going to do what they do and you can’t control that.

You get the most benefit from competition when you focus instead on yourself. How are you going to get better, right? If you want to beat them or, at least, stay even with them, you’ve got to improve.

You’ve got to get better, so focus mostly on yourself.

How can you improve your skills? How can you improve your communication? How can you be a better competitor?

When you do that, competition becomes much more positive, because it becomes a motivation for self-improvement. So focus mostly on yourself, not on the other team, not on the opponent, not on the competitor.

Number two, focus on the process rather than winning.

This is another hard one. So we’re taught to win, winning is everything, win-win-win, gotta beat them, win-win-win.

If you win, you’re a champion, yay, celebrate! If you lose, then walk off the field feeling terrible. That’s BS and that’s not really how most of life works, okay, nobody wins all the time, nobody.

Even the best champions in any sport they lose a lot, they lose plenty. Like the best soccer or football teams, they still lose lots of games, right?

They might win one championship one year or even two or three years in a row, but eventually they don’t. Nobody can win all the time every time, so if you focus on winning only, you’re going to be unhappy a lot of the time, in fact, probably most of the time you’ll be unhappy.

So instead of focusing on winning, focus on the process. In other words, focus on improvement. Focus on better teamwork. Focus on the skills that you need to get better.

Focus on all the things that will make you better and focus on the ways that you could potentially win and then when the time comes, it doesn’t matter what happens.

You feel good about yourself because you did your best. You improved as much as you could. You used as much effort, you put all of your effort into the fight, into the competition.

Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win, but if you do that whatever happens you can keep your head up and feel good about yourself, and walk off the field or the presentation or the stage, whatever it is, and you can feel good about yourself.

And you will feel good because you’ll be better. You’ll have made yourself better. You’ll know you did your best and there’s no shame in that, even if you lose sometimes.

A third part, and this is important, is an attitude of playfulness.

See it as a game. I think this is maybe, one of the things that makes people so miserable when they compete is they’re too serious about it. And this is true for winners and losers.

I’ve seen both, right? People who lose and then they cry, eh they’re super upset, “Ah I lost.” But even with winners they’re so serious and so crazy about winning-winning-winning-winning, that there’s no fun, there’s no joy, there’s no excitement, there’s no happiness in it. So even if they win, it doesn’t matter and if they lose, they’re miserable.

And that’s a lot of the reason why many of us see competition as negative, it’s those kinds of attitudes, but you don’t have to have that attitude.

Competition can be something that’s playful and enjoyable, right? As kids I remember we used to play American football in the street every day and we’d fight and tackle and sometimes, you know, my friends would win and sometimes my team would win.

But we all just loved the game, it was so much fun and it didn’t really matter, I mean, we tried to win, but in the end of the day, it didn’t matter if we won or lost really, because we just had so much fun playing the game. Because we realized it was a game, right? A game.

In truth most competition is a game, even in business, it’s a game. Yes, we might lose money or make money, but in the end it’s just a game, right?

We’re not gonna take that money with us after we die. It’s a game. And the more you can view the competition as a game and as something to enjoy, something that’s more playful, the more benefit you get from the competition, the more you improve, the more productive you become, and the more positive and happy you feel while competing.

It won’t become something that’s scary or negative. It becomes something that’s fun and positive. So you’re smiling as you compete. And then at the end, win or lose, you still feel good.

And finally, at a deeper level, a philosophical level, realize that ultimately, you’re just competing with yourself. That in any competition, the true competition is not really with that other person, they’re helping you in a way.

You’re competing with yourself. You’re competing against your own fears. You’re competing against your own weaknesses.

You’re competing against your own worries. You’re competing against your own doubts. You’re competing against your own limits, and

You’re trying to push beyond those things and discover what is possible for you.

And when you think that way, you can think of your opponent as a helper. They’re helping you. They’re pushing you to be more. They’re pushing you to go beyond your current limits, your current fears, your current doubts.

They’re pushing you to go and grow and become more, and in that way, your competitor is actually your ally. And that’s what I think about when I thought about the stick fighting, right?

Or with the business example, that those copycat guys, that in the end they’re helping me grow, they’re helping me get better, they’re helping me improve as a teacher still. They’re helping me stay motivated and excited about what I’m doing, not just keep doing everything the same.

And if I realize that, I can realize, you know, in a way then they are my friends and my allies, they’re actually benefitting me.

Think about that any time you find yourself in a competition, and especially if you start getting upset about it. Start thinking, how am I actually competing with myself? Where is the real competition?

It’s inside. It’s my own fears. It’s my own emotions. It’s my own limits, my own weaknesses. And you’ll appreciate that competition a lot more and even appreciate your opponents. Even if you don’t like them, you can still appreciate them and respect them for how they’re helping you grow.

So this month, what I want you to do is to find some area in your life where you can compete in a positive way using all the ideas I just discussed. It might be a sport. It might be a business, I don’t know, whatever.

But find some competition that you feel is healthy and fun and that will push you to improve and to grow. And most of all, as you do it, keep that playful positive attitude and enjoy the benefits of competing.

I’ll see you next time. Have a great day. Bye for now.