The Competition Is Worse Than You Think

At some point in the cultural zeitgeist it became fashionable to doubt experts. This is riddled with issues when scaled up, but there are valid reasons for it. The first is that doubt is good. A sprinkling of skepticism is a hedge against the fallibility of people, not to mention their deceptive capacity. The second is that, as you move through life in an upward direction, you'll start to realise something that both liberates and unsettles in equal measure: quite a lot of the people “at the top” of a field don’t know what they’re doing. You wonder how on earth they survived so long without others realising it, or maybe they were kept around precisely for that reason — useful idiots of sorts. Once you’ve encountered this a few times, that distrust towards people in positions of authority, or even institutions in general, grows further. What shocks me though is where people do not apply this thinking, namely, to their competitors.

A competitor could be anyone: a business, a colleague, or a more nebulous person that you might never meet yet be in competition with. You encounter the latter kind when applying for jobs, they are the CVs that flood in along with yours. I’ve noticed that many people shy away from jobs with a juicy salary. They see that annual figure, fantasise about what that must be like, then let a cluster of assumptions stop them from even applying. The main belief is that other people are simply at a higher level than they are. To be fair, there’s a good chance at least some of the people applying will be. But, it’s never as many as you’d think.

The following anecdotes happened within the same week.

While sitting in a local café, a friend of mine gestured knowingly towards a woman who had just walked past us. I gathered accurately that this meant he found her attractive. Without thinking too much about it, I said to him, “why not go over and start up a conversation?” In response, he said, “nah, she probably gets guys coming up to her all the time.” I spent the rest of the conversation probing the logic of this. I’m sure it was very annoying, but I had fun.

Later in the week a female friend of mine did not gesture knowingly at anyone, so I did it for her. It was towards a waiter who looked dishy (he was actually carrying dishes at the time too). I asked her whether she found him attractive — I ask these sorts of things — and she said she did. Relishing the chance to see this story from the other side, I then asked her whether she’d want him to start up a flirtatious conversation with her. She told me that never happened. “Never!?” “Yep, never, except for random drunk guys on nights out here and there.”

Before you say it, no, I didn’t try to set these two friends up with each other.

I’ve tried a lot of things in my life: wild schemes, business ventures, sneaky strategies, the lot of it. At some point I’ll then see a video of some person claiming something I’ve tried is the “big move to make to get rich” or “this is a scam!!” Most of what I’ve tried didn’t work. Some of it did though, and an even smaller subsection of the things that worked, worked astonishingly well. Just try it. That’s the big dumb secret of it all. Don’t listen too much to people (except me of course). Let experience be the guide. Not the scars of experience, or the insecurities it can imbue. Not the positive biases that good times cement into sentiment. None of that. Experience seen through clear eyes and willingness to go again. Just that.

Now, I’m more than willing to extrapolate a whole theory from two data points (my friends) for the sake of a blog post, but this is something I've seen in many areas of life. Most of what’s worth having in life lies waiting on the other side of a fearful assumption. The competition is rarely as good as we think it is. In many cases, there is literally no competition at all.

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