Why We Compete

Craig Gemmell

Apr 5 2019

We’ve had three revisit days over the past week. So much showing and telling to a wonderful, robust collection of admitted students and their families. All the while, in every conversation I had, I saw why our admissions staff picked the students they did: each would be immensely well-served here and each would, in turn, bring much goodness to the community. All the while, my inner monologue spoke to me: tell Brewster’s truth--its magic--clearly and passionately because these kids can thrive here and Brewster will be strengthened by their presence. All the while, I felt myself competing, striving. And while the week’s pace was relentless and should have left me tired, a powerful competitive impulse has filled my sails.

In moments of pause during this revisit season, I realized that I’ve been in a week-long cognitive and emotional endurance race—a kind of New York Marathon of admissions.

My last actual New York Marathon ended at the finish line on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in Central Park. Barely. I had hurt a knee with just over six miles left, and it had been a long last stretch down 5th Avenue and into the park for a trying limp among the cheering masses. But I kept going because, I suspect, I was training for times when a hard-earned success really mattered.

I watch our students compete on all sort of stages—in the classroom, on our playing fields, the lake, in the gym. And I see in their eyes what some surely have seen in my eyes while moving through the sea of revisit parents or running among a sea of strangers through New York’s boroughs. A drive powerful enough to suppress any urge to yield. A drive to endure and thrive.

So I am thinking about competition and its value.

Evolutionary biologists have long understood the critical importance of competition in determining relative fitness of different organisms; the stronger survive in a competitive world. But we are humans, possessing free will and reason in measures deeper than most (if not all) species. So how best can we understand competition? What I know is that at our human level we too often reduce competition to a zero-sum game with winners and losers, and such reduction doesn’t do justice to what I suspect is a deeper truth.

I believe we need to teach our kids to compete--to push themselves to achieve their best at moments--because understanding how to do so steels them to accomplish great things in their lives and gives them staying power to push on when conditions grow more challenging. I also believe we need to help them (and ourselves) to see beyond the zero-sum game, to see competition not as an ends but as a means of liberating their greatest potential and thus liberating their deepest and most true potentials. Earlier this week, tennis legend Pam Shriver shared her wisdom with a group of adults and female athletes. She encouraged us to focus less on the tangibles, the titles and statistics, and more on what she calls the intangibles, building confidence, resilience, managing stress. In emphasizing the development of these forms of mental strength, she is, I think, pushing against that idea of the zero-sum game of competition. One can finish last or fall short of a PR, but gain wisdom and build the capacity in the process. Plenty of students end up not being accepted to their number one college choice without “losing.” Even in the face of exhaustion and perhaps some sadness, new opportunities for growth are always emerging.

So as I write at the end of a busy week, eager to watch a host of spring games on snowless fields, I urge us all to think about the value of competition: its power to lift up all who benefit from the successes that come of the struggle.