A Little More Competition…

Last night I had a late night chat with Perk Chris about the nature of competition–when to internalize it, when to help out competitors, and when to fight. We weren’t talking about business, but relationships.

Tony, Sara, and I were at the Barking Dog the other night and there was this couple dancing. They were conspicuously incongruous, at least in the most obvious way. She looked like a Katie Holmes on Dawson’s Creek–you know the girl next door who you only wished lived next door (and hadn’t yet turned to scientology). And let’s just say the closest actor he could be compared to would be one of the guys fighting for a remote in a Budweiser commercial. And no, he wasn’t much of a dancer either.

I’m not sure exactly how T & S felt, but it was kind of weird for me; I mean, wtf! Every once in a while I get one of those odd competitive feelings…but especially in scenarios like that it’s obvious the whole story isn’t represented. To go back to Perk Chris, he brought up the point of some Lithuanian nymph he dated. Even with a little bit of a gut, it’s pretty obvious why that had worked out–a more grounded, traveled, and captivating person you won’t come across.

But it all made for some interesting debate. Needless to say, in all cases the best approach seemed to be to keep your mouth shut. I guess this ties in with my other recent post on competition–you’re never going to know the whole them and the world’s not going to know the whole you…even if it seems like respect or praise isn’t distributed to your liking.

All of this talk does make me feel a little uncomfortable overall. I was just reading my cousin’s post about his successes in the book publishing/editing world. One of his comments was:

I have no sense of entitlement. I’ve worked pretty damn hard to get where I am. Both a[s] a full-blown editor and now a novelist. Right now I’m twenty six. I want to shake up both sides of the industry. I feel I’m on the right track to doing that. But all I needed was a slight opening.

I’d like to write a paragraph like that and feel like I wasn’t being a little pretentious (to give him credit, he’s done a lot and he’s deserving…but anyhow). But I can’t. And neither could he: after he posted it online last night he quickly retracted the entire entry (some day he’ll realize the web doesn’t allow you to really retract things). Similarly I’ve had my fair share of accomplishments and I want to write that paragraph, but I can’t…and not just because it’d sound pretentious but because it’s hard, at least for me, to say I don’t sometimes feel entitled.

Which leads me back to the whole conept of competition. Be it in relationships or business, I guess the lesson is that feelings of competitiveness are going to be there…but they need to be tempered. So long as we do right by people, it’s okay if we wonder why Katie Holmes is with him…but we just need to remember that if she weren’t with him there’s no sense in assuming she’d be with us.

My conversation with Perk Chris started with, “you built an awesome coffeehouse that fosters exactly the kind of community you hoped for, you’re running a successful construction business, you’re about to marry a girl a bit younger than you…and you don’t seem to act competitive or entitled; how do you that?” His answer was that he’s always been that way…and that he’s definitely competitive in some ways. I think I have to spend some time reconciling that statement and figuring out how to take a little piece of Perk Chris into my own perspective…