In many situations in life – especially within a company or within a family – co-operation is a much more powerful principle than competition.
We all have a competitive instinct or drive, though, and many games
make the most of this to ramp up the level of fun, excitement and
involvement. (Sports, multi-player computer games, and board games all
have “winners” and “losers”.)
As well as enjoying being competitive in game and play situations, we
can use our natural competitive bent to give ourselves an edge when
we’re trying to make gains in our personal life.
I’m going to give just three examples, but I’m sure you can come up
with more areas of your life to apply this to (let’s hear them in the
comments!)
Eating More Healthily
Perhaps you and your partner, or you and your friend, have tried out
various healthy eating or weight-loss plans in the past. More likely
than not, these haven’t lasted too long. One of you feels low on
will-power, says “Forget it, I’m having a slice of cake!” – and the
other person caves in too.
It could go very differently if you introduced an element of healthy
competitiveness. I’d caution against competing on something like actual
weight lost, as this is influenced by factors such as metabolism, gender
and how overweight you were to begin with. Similarly, don’t compete on
how far you can both run, or how heavy the weights you can lift are.
Instead, set yourself some competitive goals to reach like:
- Who can hit five portions of fruit-and-veg a day, every day, for a week?
- Who can go for a week without chocolate (or alcohol/cheese/etc…)
- Who can stick to their planned exercise sessions for a month?
- …and so on.
You get the idea. Compete on things which are under your direct control.
You’ll be amazed how this can really boost your will-power: knowing
that the other person is heading off for their gym session can get you
up off the sofa and raring to go – you don’t want to lose!
Saving Money
You might want to do this with a spouse, friend or colleague. The
idea is to see who can spend the least or save the most over a period of
time. As with eating healthily or losing weight, compete on things
which involve meeting targets that you’ve agreed with one another (you
don’t necessarily need to have exactly the same targets).
For example:
- Who can go for a week without buying any food out?
- Who can last a whole weekend without spending money?
- How long can you manage without spending a cent on entertainment?
- Who can meet their savings goal for three months running?
As with healthy eating, this can turn something that might otherwise seem like hard work into something fun. Trent writes about this in Making Frugality a Game on The Simple Dollar (a personal finance blog), saying:
If you can turn frugality into a mutual challenge, you can turn
something that you might otherwise view as drudgery into something quite
fun.
Writing a Novel
There’s an often-quoted adage that “everyone has at least one book in
them” – and you may well feel that’s true for yourself. A lot of people
have a long-cherished ambition to write a novel, but they never manage
to get around to it – or they get started and quickly run out of steam.
Back in 2007, I took part in NaNoWriMo
(National Novel Writing Month), where participants take on the
challenge of writing a 50,000 word novel in a month. You “win” simply by
reaching the word count: it’s an easy measure, and no-one’s going to
complain about the quality of your writing, or say that what you’ve
written isn’t very novel-shaped.
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