Economy or rivalry?

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If you don’t become what they want you to become, they get angry. Because everyone can tell you exactly how to live, while they don’t even know what to do with their own lives.

— Paolo Coelho, The Alchemist

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In 2004, my crew and I reach the final of one of the most prestigious rowing tournaments in the world. We win. Six weeks later, I still walk around like the exhausted mop that collapsed over the finish line. I’m twenty-two years old and this is not how I should feel. Luckily, I have a doctor who knows what to do.

‘Mundo,’ he says firmly, ‘you’re overtrained—take it easy.’

I take his words for truth, but inside, I know better. I’ve been feeling physically messed up since I started wanting to quit rowing. For a whole year, I fight my body towards that prestigious rowing tournament. Every stroke hurts, my body continuously asks if we can please knock it off—and I keep going.

Why?

Because I want to row—at least, that’s what I tell my crew, everyone around me and myself. The real reason is one I dare not face. I keep going because clever and fast receive more praise than dumb and slow.

No one ever became an honorary member at my rowing club because they said, in the middle of the season, ‘Guys, it’s been emotional, but I’m out of steam—I quit.’ 

Quitting is a very uncool thing to do.

So I ignore the signals that say enough, right up to that final finish line. Deep inside, I know it’s insane to hold high what wants to be put down, but it’ll take five more years before I start making honesty more important than receiving praise. I’m addicted.

The above story, as personal as it may be, is also about a fundamental flaw in our collective drive for competition, which doesn’t just reign in sports—it reigns everywhere. Much of what we call work, school, family, collaboration—even love and play—is infused with competition.

As is economics.

Economics generally sees competition as a logical and desirable consequence of that eleventh ten-euro note—or, better said, an illusion of lack. Competition makes us work harder, better and faster. Competition stimulates innovation, innovation drives prosperity and more prosperity is good. 

This chapter has already covered the ideas underlying competition, innovation and prosperity; let’s now look at their application.

Indeed, competition brings out strengths that would otherwise remain hidden, as happens when lives are at stake. A mother lifts a car with her bare hands to free her trapped child; warring sailors throw impossibly heavy bombs from their burning ship to prevent the ship from exploding; a little girl jumps over a man-high wall to escape danger… There are countless stories. 

Yet, in life-threatening situations, people just as easily fall apart. And as there, so in a debt-with-interest economy. In a debt-with-interest economy, people even need to fall apart. One can only earn because another accumulates debt, and one can only excel because another underperforms. And if that’s not undesirable enough, even among ‘winners’, I see few genuinely excel. More and more people burn out younger and younger while supposedly excelling.

This game, in which we either ‘win’ or lose, doesn’t start when we first make contact with money. Winning and losing are deeply embedded in how we teach each other to live, play and work. Much of what we call family, school, business, organisation and management is set up to produce obedience, incite competition and repeat the mistakes humanity has been repeating for aeons. Often, this happens unconsciously and with the best intentions, but that doesn’t lessen the damage.

If we need to fulfil certain conditions to reap appreciation and approval, there’s a big chance we’ll start disliking ourselves for who we are. This, in turn, drives us to build a false persona, someone who hopefully does well in the eyes of the outside world. Learning to use our adaptive skills to bury what genuinely makes us tick, will likely get us in a depressed and despondent state—and makes us forget who we are.¹In the book Unconditional Parenting, Alfie Kohn poignantly describes the harm we do by (unintentionally) rewarding and punishing our children—and fellow adults. He backs his arguments with numerous studies. More about his book, plus alternatives to punishment and rewards, can be found at MiracleProject.earth/unconditional-parenting.

Alphabet, a documentary about the current state of our educational system, painfully shows the impact of conditionality. Among others, a Chinese boy appears on screen. His mother recites a list of his achievements and pulls out a medal he won at a maths competition. Like a docile lamb, he hangs the medal around his neck.

‘Go and win some more prizes,’ his mother proudly says.

The film portrays the boy several times, but he doesn’t speak, so I can’t say what’s going on in his mind. But what I see, in every shot in which he appears, is what I see many of us go through—and what I went through, not only in my rowing career. Legions of athletes, maths prodigies, artists and businesspeople experience or end ‘brilliant’ careers in physical and mental ruin. Living for recognition instead of joy can literally exhaust us.

It’s tragic, again, because as in banking, so in competition do I see a beautiful kernel of truth. We long to flourish. We love stepping outside of trodden zones, nudging ourselves and each other past what we think we’re capable of—even when the nudging frightens us. Transcending self-imposed limits, alone or together, is an intensely beautiful and empowering experience.

But at other people’s expense?

At our own expense?

And ultimately—because that’s the inevitable finale of never enough—at the expense of everything and everyone?

I don’t see how that makes us more intelligent or more prosperous.

So, what fuels competition?

Rewards and punishment.

Two carrots, both killing our genius and innate drive for discovery—and this statement is backed by solid findings.

For example, in the 1960s, researchers developed a simple test for the US space agency NASA to identify itsmost innovative engineers and scientists.  The test measured ‘divergent thinking’ (the ability to generate multiple, novel ideas or solutions to a given problem) and worked well for its aim. Yet, it didn’t answer a more profound question: Where does creative genius come from? Is it something we’re born with, or is it a skill we learn?

Since it was a simple test, the researchers applied it to a group of 1,600 children between the ages of four and five. Ninety-eight per cent of these children scored at the ‘creative genius’ level. Five years later, the test was repeated on the same group of children, now aged nine to ten. This time, only 30 per cent scored at the creative genius level. At age fifteen, the children were tested again; this time, the number had dropped to twelve per cent.

According to George Land, one of the researchers, this is where the study ended, ‘because so many people got depressed. Most of the testing was done by teachers, and they didn’t want to do it again.’²You can watch George’s painfully funny TEDx Talk via MiracleProject.earth/creative-genius.

Follow-up studies had more than one million adults tested. Among them, a staggering two per cent came out as creative genius.³You can find more about these tests in the TEDx Talk mentioned in the previous note, plus in the book authored by George Land and Beth Georgeland, Breakpoint and Beyond; Mastering the Future – Today, published by HarperBusiness in 1993. 

When we’re honest, I don’t believe any of us wants to be a driving force behind humanity dumbing down. Yet the bulk of grown-ups insist that competition is the engine of prosperity, even though research keeps contradicting  this insistence.

Time and again, studies confirm that rewards and bonuses only ‘work’ for easy tasks with simple frameworks and concrete goals. When a job becomes even slightly challenging, rewards and punishments tend to paralyse rather than encourage. Even worse, the higher the promised reward, the more stupidly we commit to getting that reward. Why? Because rewards and punishment, a.k.a. ‘extrinsic motivation’, narrow our gaze. With a juicy carrot in our faces, we tend to see only the carrot. We close our eyes to creative avenues towards a set goal—and forget to ask a valuable question: ‘Is the set goal the best goal?’⁴A fun and well-researched resource on what science knows and what the world does is Dan Pink’s TED talk ‘The Puzzle of Motivation’, which you can watch on MiracleProject.earth/intrinsic-drive.

Even people who think they want a society where others do neatly what we tell them, shoot themselves in the foot with extrinsic motivation. The more people are rewarded for something, the more they tend to lose interest in what they need to do to get the reward. Dozens of studies among people of different ages, genders and cultural backgrounds came to this or a similar conclusion.⁵More of such research is summarised in Alfie Kohn’s book Punished by Rewards, which he refers to extensively from his book Unconditional Parenting. See MiracleProject.earth/unconditional-parenting.

In short, good workhorses, rewarded for their work, become bad workhorses.

To boot, there’s this annoying human trait: not always (or just never) doing as we’re told. A big portion of humans that grow up constantly hearing ‘Well done!’ or ‘Shame on you!’ will, at one point, start rebelling, sabotaging, and even fighting their fellows.

Again, we can oppose such statements. One frequently used argument is based on the idea of a ‘natural order’, with poor people being poor because they’re stupid, for example. Poor people don’t have a rich brain, don’t know how to earn money, don’t want to earn money—or they earn it but then waste it on stupid things.

Accurate as this may be in some cases, research again shows that in the overwhelming majority, something else is going on. A study in America indicates that poor people are poor not because they’re stupid but because poverty encourages poor-making behaviour. Researchers put people’s cognitive abilities alongside their thoughts about money, and what they saw is that worries—be they about money, time, food or whatever—consume mental bandwidth. And a head full of aches automatically slips into survival mode.

As with rewards and punishment, a worrying head narrows its focus on the short term. Things that are also important are moved aside. The result: decisions that create, perpetuate and worsen poverty. Conclusion: poverty is more likely a cause of stupid behaviour than a result.⁶Author Rutger Bregman interviewed one of the researchers for an article, ‘Why poor people do stupid things’, available on Decorrespondent.nl. For the full research paper, see Anandi Mani et al, ‘Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function’. Science, Vol. 341, 30 Aug 2013, pp. 976-980.

This last research limited itself to people at the bottom of the social ladder: poorly educated, living on meagre wages and often badly taking care of themselves. An understandable choice, but is it any different at the top? Making ends meet for your children, making a profit for your shareholders, or continuing to row for another shot of praise—I see no difference.

Poverty, the way I’ve come to view it, primarily resides inside us.

And poverty can only make a home for itself in people who unconsciously believe they’re lacking.

_

• 1
  In the book Unconditional Parenting, Alfie Kohn poignantly describes the harm we do by (unintentionally) rewarding and punishing our children—and fellow adults. He backs his arguments with numerous studies. More about his book, plus alternatives to punishment and rewards, can be found at MiracleProject.earth/unconditional-parenting. ↩︎
• 2
  You can watch George’s painfully funny TEDx Talk via MiracleProject.earth/creative-genius. ↩︎
• 3
  You can find more about these tests in the TEDx Talk mentioned in the previous note, plus in the book authored by George Land and Beth Georgeland, Breakpoint and Beyond; Mastering the Future – Today, published by HarperBusiness in 1993.  ↩︎
• 4
  A fun and well-researched resource on what science knows and what the world does is Dan Pink’s TED talk ‘The Puzzle of Motivation’, which you can watch on MiracleProject.earth/intrinsic-drive. ↩︎
• 5
  More of such research is summarised in Alfie Kohn’s book Punished by Rewards, which he refers to extensively from his book Unconditional Parenting. See MiracleProject.earth/unconditional-parenting. ↩︎
• 6
  Author Rutger Bregman interviewed one of the researchers for an article, ‘Why poor people do stupid things’, available on Decorrespondent.nl. For the full research paper, see Anandi Mani et al, ‘Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function’. Science, Vol. 341, 30 Aug 2013, pp. 976-980. ↩︎