Know Your Worth and Go For It!

If you stop and think about it, you realize that we exist in a world of competition. Now, this is something that a lot of people don’t feel comfortable thinking about. They don’t like to think about having to compete. They don’t like to view life as a zero-sum game. They would rather view the world as cooperative. Instead of survival, the rules of the game are shaded towards sharing. However, there is a problem with this way of thinking. It is unrealistic. 

Competition is built into our genes. It is bred into our bones. We, by necessity, are competitive animals. It is the nature of the way things are. It is how the world works. It is the design of things. Now, some people don’t like to think about the world in these terms. However, a reluctance to accept reality doesn’t change reality, it is simply a delusion. Delusional thinking serves no helpful purpose. In many instances, it is actively harmful. So, as a first step to developing an increased sense of worth, purge yourself of any delusional thoughts and prepare to accept the fact that by embracing competitiveness you actual begin to embrace yourself.

Think about nature. Think about the wild. What are the terms and conditions of existence there? Is it cooperative? Is it competitive? Is it a combination of both? There is a misconception that nature is designed to be cutthroat. It’s an easy mistake to make. At first glance, nature seems chaotic. There are no hierarchies. There seems to be no law. It appears to be very violent and brutal. All of these observations are true. Nature is chaotic. There is no higher power to appeal to when the prey is being eaten by the predator. However, that is largely a surface observation.

When you look at nature more closely, you begin to see that there is a mixture of cooperation at work along with the obvious competition. Yes, life in the wild can be brutal and short. However, without the requisite cooperative structure that exists on the broader canvas of competition, all life, both predator, and prey, would cease to exist. Let’s take a look at some examples.

Consider the bee and the flower. The bee gathers nectar from the flower that it needs for food. In doing so, it collects pollen from one plant and deposits it in another. Neither bee nor plant can exist without the other. They are interdependent. Biologists have a word for this type of relationship. They call it symbiotic. Each partner in the symbiosis is out for themselves. The bee wants food. The plant wants to reproduce. However, this self-interest is used in a way that achieves the desired end result for both partners. You could say that it was competitiveness overlaid with a veneer of cooperation, albeit unintentional.

This type of symbiotic example is repeated over and over again in the animal world. Ravens who find carrion will eschew keeping it for themselves in favor of flying off and communicating their find to the rest of the flock. They know that there is safety in numbers. Some ravens can feed while others watch for danger.

Pilot fish nibble off the skin of sharks looking for bacteria. The pilot fish get a meal, the sharks get a cleaning.  The same relationship exists between the rhino and the oxpecker bird. 

In fact, the very cells in our bodies are a testament to the fact that cooperation and competition exist side by side. The proteins that make up our DNA are organic molecules that are only interested in self-survival. Yet, they learned to combine together to form long chains that were better suited to finding food for the individual members. These long chains, called amino acids, were the first building blocks of life. If it wasn’t for cooperation, we wouldn’t be here at all.

So what does this mean to us? Well, we cannot forget that we are products of nature. What we do and what we have built echo the rhythms that play inside of us all. Therefore, when we look out at civilization, we cannot give into the temptation to see everything as competition alone. In our world, nothing would exist without the natural anchor of cooperation acting as a drag on the more destructive impulses of competition. Business, politics, the very fabric of society itself depends on our helping each other in an equal amount to helping ourselves. It doesn’t matter that much of this cooperation isn’t altruistic. It doesn’t matter what the motive behind the impulse is, what matters is that the symbiosis between us exists.