Competition used to know its place. In sports it was clean and necessary. In certain work environments it sharpened people. It had a container, a defined space with rules and a finish line and a trophy at the end. And crucially, in its healthiest form, it had something that the modern version has completely abandoned: the expectation that once you won the prize, you went back down the ladder and brought someone up with you. That was the original deal. That was what made competition a force for collective progress rather than just individual elevation. We have lost that part entirely.
When Competition Left the Arena
The problem is not competition itself. The problem is what happens when competition escapes its container and spreads into parts of life that were never designed to hold it.
It started in workplaces, where it made a certain kind of sense. Then it moved into friendships, where it started to corrode. Then into parenting, where it became something genuinely ugly. Now we have parents competing with each other for the title of best parent. Arguing over who taught the child what. Taking credit for achievements in ways that turn a child's success into a trophy for the parent's ego rather than a moment of genuine pride.
I am the last child for both my parents, and I think as a result of that I grew up without a strong competitive instinct toward other people. I never had a sibling to outrun. I did not arrive in a family where resources were being divided among multiple children and you had to fight for your share. That shaped me in ways I only understood later.
What Rusty Taught Me Without Knowing It
When I was in car sales between 2000 and 2002, I worked in an environment that could easily have been cutthroat. Four salespeople. Commission on the line. Every customer a potential point of conflict.
But our supervisor, Nigel, who everyone called Rusty, ran it differently. He was never pitting us against each other. He was always working to make sure everyone played their part and everyone got a result. We covered for each other. We passed leads that were not in our lane. We celebrated each other's closes.
There was always one person in that group who wanted to outshine everyone. Who needed to be the biggest number at the end of the month. And what I watched, over and over, was that Rusty kept the group winning together regardless. The individual glory-seeker did not take over the culture because the culture was stronger than his ego.
That stayed with me. Cooperation is more efficient than competition. The data from a cooperative model takes longer to accumulate because everyone is rising at the same time, and rising together is harder to measure than a single standout. But the outcome is more durable, more equitable, and far less destructive to the human beings involved.
The Slave Master's Most Lasting Invention
I want to say something that I think about seriously and that I believe is one of the most important frames for understanding why Black communities in particular struggle with the cooperation model.
Slavery gave the master a tool that has outlasted the institution itself. Once a year, or whenever it suited the power structure, the master would invite one enslaved person into the house. To eat at the table. To be elevated above the others, temporarily and conditionally.
And in the weeks and months leading up to that moment, the enslaved community would turn on each other. Sabotage. Gossip. Undermining. Not because they were bad people but because a brutal system had successfully made one person's elevation feel like everyone else's threat. And the person who got chosen was hated by the others. And the hatred served the master perfectly, because a community that is busy destroying itself from the inside will never organise to overthrow the system from the outside.
That psychology did not end with slavery. It was too deeply installed. It is why, in so many Black communities today, you do not try to sell your idea to your friends first. They will not support you the way a stranger will. Not because they do not love you but because somewhere in the inherited architecture of survival, your success still feels like the dinner invitation they did not get. Your rise still triggers the old competition for the master's approval.
Understanding this does not excuse it. But it does explain it. And you cannot dismantle a pattern you have never named.
What a Cooperation Model Actually Looks Like
It looks like Rusty keeping four salespeople winning together instead of ranking them against each other.
It looks like choosing not to take credit when someone you mentored succeeds, because their success is the point, not your visibility in it.
It looks like being genuinely happy when someone in your circle achieves something, even when you have not yet. Not performed happiness. Real happiness, rooted in the understanding that their rise does not diminish your potential.
It is slower. The metrics do not spike the way they do when one person goes hard for individual glory. But it compounds in a way that individual competition never does. And it produces something competition structurally cannot: a community where the people around you are invested in your growth rather than quietly hoping you plateau.
That is worth more than any trophy. And it starts with the decision to stop treating every other person's success as evidence of your own insufficiency.
"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
African Proverb