I am competitive and hate to lose. When I feel like someone will be better than me in something, she rolls a break somewhere deep inside me and puts me in overdrive.

This is not limited to the work I do in Futurefund, Timen FREE PLANTS FOR FUNDING MODER for K-12 school groups. I want to be athlete, coach, family husband and software engineer I can be. And for the most part, this works. It motivates me to try for perfection and continue to challenge myself instead of being very comfortable and stagnant.

But the same tendency that drives me to shine in these things can sometimes become counterproductive. my does not like to lose Actually is so strong that I often hate playing games on board. As you can imagine, this can really put a breakdown on the night of the family game if I don't keep it under control.

Many people in technology are such because it is a competitive landscape. Maybe it's the same for you: whatever you do, you have to do 100% – and because you put 100% of yourself in something, it is almost impossible for your success or failure not to feel like a reflection of who you are. Like me, you have a brand, and that brand is: when you do something, you will succeed.

The trick is to keep your the feeling of competition healthy in order to serve your work and personal goals instead of getting your way. Here's how I do it – and how you can.

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The way you respond to competition is a choice

Not everyone responds to competition in the same way. People tend to fall into one of the two groups when they prove that someone else succeeds in a goal they have themselves.

The first group tries to sabotage the success they see in others. They ask how they can shift the reputation of their competition in order to be negative. This is most often accepted by how much you can assume. We tend to look down under brands that function clearly Staining campaigns Against their rivals, but many companies are removed by writing press releases that favorably compare their products or services to those of their biggest competitors.

The second group tries to improve in order for them to match and overcome the success that others see. They become motivated to improve themselves instead of throwing aspirations into their rivals. This approach can feel like much more work, but I have found that it is also often much more useful.

The approach of the first group can work at first – but there are visible risks. Not only that can turn you into you if you are too heavy but also can Provoke your rivals And motivate them to work harder against you than they would normally have. But the biggest problem is that focusing on others does nothing to improve your skills.

The approach of the second group requires that you are definitely honest with yourself and your team for your strengths and weaknesses, which can be challenging at first. But also pays dividends. You learn where to invest your time and effort for maximum benefits. You become more efficient and less likely to blame others for your mistakes, and ultimately approach to become the best you can be in what you are doing.

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Wanting to win vs hate to lose

Once you have chosen to motivate yourself instead of overthrowing your competition, the next question is how to do it. Here is a way of thinking about what has always helped me:

It is not just about the desire to win; It has to do with hatred to lose. If you are something like me, the disappointment of loss is usually stronger for you than the joy of profit.

This does not allow you to be an injured loser in those cases where it inevitably happens – you do not want to destroy the night of the family game. But making it an advantage to avoid adverse results is often useful because it makes you more likely to adjust the types of things that people can allow to slip if they are very focused on their victories.

One of the main competitors finally finally left business because their support team routinely took a week to return to people. This issue would have been easy to correct, but they allow it to become their Achilles' heel. Although it may not have felt quite important for them to fix, it turned out to be important to their users.

So we decided that one of ours non-negative Would be to respond to support tickets at a reasonable time – a few hours or less. This was easy to engage, but it had a deeply positive impact on our success.

Think about this in the context of your start. Competitive attitude means celebrating your victories, but never let yourself be complained about where there is room for improvement.

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You determine what the profit is

Finally, you need a healthy way to measure and Accept your victories. This can be difficult because, in business, it is not always clear who is winning. There are no universal notes that everyone can see.

Here is my rule: competition is healthy when deciding what success looks instead of letting others do it. Measure your progress with how far you have achieved about the goals you have set instead of letting your competitors control the narrative and always be one step behind them.

Success, for me, is about being a little better than I was the day before. When you are at a beginning, your product will not be perfect at first – or maybe never. But you work to make sure it's better today than was the last month – or last week, or yesterday. This way, at least you can make sure you are going in the right direction.

If you have carefully chosen your mission, this type of progress becomes a much better reference point for success than what any other company is doing. You can read more about this in my next article below: