We live in a very competitive society. People today place a great value on winning and on being the best. I think this competitive drive is something that we must work on changing. Competition does indeed have its merits but we have to recognize its dangers.
The aim of competition is of course to win. There is a very important difference between winning and succeeding. Winning involves coming first which involves beating other people. There are thousands of ways that one can go about beating the competition. Cheating is one, impeding the performance of others is another, becoming really good oneself is yet another. But of all these ways of coming first, only a few actually include working hard and fully realizing one’s own full potential.
This makes it clear then that there is no necessary link between the competitive drive (or the drive to win) and the full realization of human potential. You can be a winner but fail to achieve excellence in yourself. The inverse is also the case; you 
can be a “loser” but succeed at fully realizing your full potential and achieving the excellence proper to yourself.
This is a very important point. Surely it is better to strive to unlock your all potential and achieve excellence in yourself? It should be clear to most that winning in fact means very little if it is not accompanied by excellence. If this is true then we must be careful not to get swept away by our competitive drive and place too high a priority on winning. Strive to be the best but ensure at all times to remember that what really matters is realizing your potential and attaining the excellence proper to you.
This is the point made by John Wooden in this talk.
Comments
2 responses to “The Difference between Winning and Succeeding”
Thank you Assad. I have a very useful example of how misinformed it is to solicit competition between colleagues. When we just started this business we had a client in the coal mining industry. One of their senior managers had two mine overseer sections in his department, and he decided that he would maximize production in his department by getting these two mine overseers to compete. The competion was monthly and the prize was a braai (barbecue) for the winning section at the end of the month. The one mine overseer lost the competition consistently because he was mining in an area where there was a lot unforseen dykes and intrusions in the seam he was mining. After having lost the completion consistently for a good number of months he instructed one of his shift bosses to drive a spike into the opposing section’s conveyor belt. They cut 15km of conveyor belt in two in revenge!
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