The Artist and the Competitor

How to Keep Ambition in Service of the Craft

On the evening of May 16, 2015, two men stood three thousand feet above the floor of Yosemite Valley about to jump off. Dean Potter was forty-three, the most famous climber of his generation. Graham Hunt was twenty-nine, his protégé and, increasingly, his rival. Just after 7:30, they stepped off in wingsuits, aiming for a V-shaped notch in a rocky ridgeline. Potter’s girlfriend stood nearby where they jumped with a camera. Hunt’s girlfriend waited at the landing zone.

Fifteen seconds into the flight, Hunt hit a side wall of the notch. Potter cleared it and crashed into the rocks beyond. Both lost their lives. In the Dark Wizard, the documentary series about Potter’s life, Dean’s sister Elizabeth tried to explain who her brother was. What she said has been rattling around in my head ever since:

“My brother would say the key to happiness is following beauty and not the urge to be the best. Was he able to always do that? No. Right up to the end, that was something he really battled. But in his most centered moments, he knew it was about listening to your heart and following that.”

Beauty versus the urge to be the best. That’s the central tension of so much of performance. For Potter, this inner argument unfolded in a world where judgment had immediate consequences and a single mistake could be fatal. For the rest of us, the consequences usually accumulate more slowly: burnout, ethical compromise, resentment, or the gradual loss of the love that brought us to the work.

It’s the inner battle between love of the thing, the artistic side, of feeling alive or in flow while you’re flying down the track or letting that creative spark take over. And it’s also the competitive instinct. The desire to win, to be the best, to make a name for yourself.

Too often, we treat these as competing forces that are opposites. I get the inclination, but I don’t think that’s the case. It’s far messier. It’s more that we need these working in harmony.

How do we make sure competition brings out the best in us? That’s the trick all performers, from athletes to artists to entrepreneurs, are trying to master.

Before the Scoreboard

Long before we understand ranking, we understand absorption. We all start with the desire for joy and expression. Those feelings are what drive us initially. Just go look at a toddler roaming around trying to figure out a simple puzzle or to explore their new environment. There’s no comparison going on. In fact, they’re largely oblivious to everyone else, including the other toddler in the same room. The feelings that come with mastery of a task are what push our earliest pursuits.

Over time, we develop an awareness of others. First, to the friendly audience of mom and dad watching. And over time, to our sibling or friend doing the same activity. That urge to win, to be better, surfaces in all of us. We become deeply aware of how we stack up. And that can fuel us to pushing our performance to a new level, or getting us to throw in the towel because it’s not worth the effort.

We all have the competitive fire, but for some of us the scoreboard is always on and we’re staring at it. We’re the person who competes like crazy even against their kids at Monopoly. For others, it’s hidden, only coming out when needed in a chosen pursuit.

Almost every one of us starts out pursuing the thing as an interest that develops into love or joy of the craft. At some point, we start competing with others. First, maybe just in more abstract comparison, but over time potentially head to head.

It’s how we manage that jump that determines whether we’re stuck proving our worth, or letting the work reveal and shape who we are.

When Love Becomes Obligation

In the pleasant Montreal summer, psychologist Robert Vallerand went to a few different cycling events and had folks fill out a questionnaire on their passion for the sport. They were all regular cyclists, putting in about 10 hours a week of training. Then he waited…

In February, when the average temperature was hanging out at 8 degrees Fahrenheit with about 80 inches of snow having accumulated, he reached back out to find out who was still cycling outside in the hazardous conditions. Only 30% were, and it was those who scored dramatically higher in what he called obsessive passion back in August.

Vallerand found that there are two kinds of passion. They both come with the same intensity and drive, it’s just what fuels them underneath. Obsessive passion comes from “I have to do this to remain who I am.” It’s an almost compulsion that has a bit of fear or insecurity underlying it. Harmonious passion is driven by love of the thing. It’s “I choose to do this” because it aligns with my values and interests. You’re able to step away when needed. It doesn’t control you.

The only thing that predicted who’d ride through the ice was whether the passion controlled the person. As he wrote, “It is as if the person said: ‘I know it’s not good for me, but I can’t help myself, I just have to continue doing this activity.’”

His paradigm holds beyond just cyclists training in the ice. Later research on dancers found that those with more harmonious passion tended to have fewer prolonged injuries, while those with more obsessive passion tended to have chronic injuries. Why? The harmonious folks would seek out information and help. They were willing to take off a few days if it meant long-term health. Those with more obsessive passion, refused to even partially scale back training and admitted that personal pride was what prevented them from getting treatment

It’s not that we are either obsessive or harmonious. We have both. It’s whether one dominates the other, whether the compulsion drowns out the desire.

The difference is not intensity. It is ownership and identity. Harmonious passion says, “This is part of who I am.” Obsessive passion says, “Without this, I do not know who I am.”

For Potter, following beauty was the language of choice: the experience called to him. The urge to remain the best carried a different demand. It made the next accomplishment responsible for protecting his identity, reputation, and place in the world.

That’s what the obsessive variety does. It nudges us towards defending our spot. That’s the essence of the variety of competition that pits us against others. As researchers found in studying elite swimmers across a season, the lesson was: intensity wasn’t the problem. The quality of the motivation underneath it was.

Competing isn’t the issue here. The intensity of the passion isn’t it either. It’s tying our worth and value to defending our place that is. When mistakes, failure, or results threaten our status, self-worth, and sense of where we belong, that’s when bad things happen.

The danger occurs when the next feat, the next result becomes a verdict on whether you are still who you think you are. We’ve got to be in charge of our definition of success. That’s what Potter’s beauty versus competition is all about. One defines ‘success’ as the act itself, the feeling of aliveness that comes with it. The other, exports that definition. It hands it to someone or something else.

Defining Success and The Arena

The battle is in writing your definition of success, and then holding true to it.

In psychology, this is represented in the idea of task vs. ego orientation. When we take a task approach to a craft, we’re asking: Am I learning, improving, solving, or expressing? It’s about the act itself. When we take an ego orientation, we’re asking: Did I establish my superiority? It’s about status and rank.

A group of researchers out of the University of Birmingham randomly assigned students to play table soccer under a few framings. One group got the “Table Soccer Challenge”: learn three skills at your own pace, get rewarded for self-improvement. Another got the “Table Soccer Competition”: a top-ten leaderboard mounted next to the table, scores to be posted on the school’s website, and instructions to outperform the expert in the training videos. While the third was a control. Then they had reviewers who were blind to the condition watch everyone on hidden cameras to see what they did.

The competition group racked up roughly double the antisocial acts of the others. They broke the rules nearly twice as often, taunting doubled, and displays of anger tripled. And when players later got the chance to gift bonus goals to their opponent, with real stakes attached (raffle tickets for a £50 cash draw), the challenge/mastery group gave away more. The researchers didn’t find worse people. They built them.

Researchers found that the more years people spent in a heavily win-focused sports environment, the more ego orientation they had and the lower moral functioning. Similarly, other work found that ego orientation was tied to a higher likelihood of doping in sport. We don’t need research to tell us this. Just look at the Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Lance Armstrongs of the world. When remaining on top becomes responsible for protecting the self, cheating becomes easier to rationalize. The question shifts from “Is this right?” to “What do I have to do to remain who everyone believes I am?”

We all have that pull towards measuring up and winning. But if we let it run amok, the competitive fuel that can help raise our game, turns against us. I know this drift because I lived it as a runner. What began as the simple satisfaction of moving fast gradually became a referendum on who I was. Racing moved from exploration to a judgement on who I was as a person. The more I needed running to prove something, the harder it became to run freely.

It might seem like competition and artistry or mastery are opposites, but they’re not. It’s only when competition gets pushed in the wrong direction, with a crappy definition of success underlying it. Competition directed toward discovery can become part of the art.

Competition is not merely something the artist must survive. At its best, it is a creative constraint. An opponent helps reveal possibilities we could not see alone. A race against others, gives you the extra juice to convince your brain to push a little deeper into the depths of fatigue so you can explore just a bit longer. Another writer, scientist, musician, or entrepreneur can help us to sharpen and refine our ideas. In this form, the competitor is not someone standing between us and the work. They become part of the work.

We can see it in the original meaning of compete, which stood for “striving together.” A modern twist on this might be, do we see our fellow competitors as either a:

1. Threat: Their success diminishes me.

2. Teacher: Their presence reveals more of me.

The question is never simply how competitive we are. It is what we are competing against, and what the competition is for.

Psychologists measuring competitiveness found that hypercompetitiveness and personal-development competitiveness are statistically independent traits. You can be intensely competitive without being hypercompetitive”

We can see this in the research on the impact of rivalries. Rivalries genuinely raise our game. Runners literally run faster against a rival than against a stranger. But the same research found rivalry’s dark side: it makes the stakes feel personal, tying our self-worth to the outcome. And once self-worth is on the line, we drift toward doing “whatever it takes.” We transform into “win at all costs.” It’s the same signature as obsessive passion: the outcome stops being something you want and becomes something you are.

Once again, it comes back to what’s underlying our competitiveness, our basic drive and motivation.

Just to be clear, following beauty is not a safety protocol. Pure motives do not make dangerous activities safe, just as competitive motives do not make tragedy inevitable. The argument here is about what these motives do to judgment, identity, and our relationship with the work—not about reducing Potter’s death to a tidy psychological explanation.

Risk Not Winning

After spending his younger years working at Los Alamos on the Atomic Bomb, Richard Feynman was afraid he’d never live up to expectations. He was burned out, working at Cornell when he decided, “I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.” Shortly after, he watched a cafeteria plate that was thrown wobble around and he worked out the rotation math for fun. “The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”

When we’re competitors, the hardest thing in the world can be to let go, to stop striving towards productivity or one-upping those around you. But often, the thing that allows us to break through is returning to our roots: play, joy, fun.

We all started out as explorers. Again, just go spend some time with toddlers or elementary school kids. But over time, as productivity and winning took center fold, we often lost a little of that magic.

It’s the same thing skateboarding legend Tony Hawk noticed when he was relentlessly practicing for another big trick. He kept falling short, and was becoming miserable doing it. His skateboarding friend Rodney Mullen gave him the advice that would set him free: “risk not winning.” He followed it, letting go just enough, so that when he returned he landed the first 900 in competition. He did not escape or flee from competition. He changed his relationship to it. Once winning stopped being compulsory, he became free to create again.

Warren Buffett called this the difference between an inner and outer scorecard: Are you measuring the work against your own values and standards, or against what other people think of you? And coach John Wooden built his entire system around the same principle: winning mattered, but the final score was not a complete measure of whether you had succeeded.

They knew the tension of the striver. They weren’t saying winning isn’t important or that striving or competing was bad. They were literally in the arena, competing. But they realized the messiness of it all. That if they didn’t create their own inner scorecard, define success, and make sure they held on to the joy and mastery that got them hooked in the first place, the ugly head of winning at all costs or obsessive passion would rear its head. And that would fundamentally alter what they fell in love with in the first place. You need to let go, just enough.

That’s the nuance of competition. It’s the messiness of striving. It’s far easier to keep the fairytale version in our head, that if we just build hard-nosed “competitors” everyone will be great. That’s not how it works. That fuel can burn you.

Mastery isn’t the absence of the urge to be the best. It’s the daily act of returning the urge to the service of the craft. It’s having something to ground you in the joy of the process. And that’s often what the best coaches do. They realize that everything in the world is already pulling us towards competing and comparing. And that it’s near impossible to resist that urge, without help and support.

For Potter, the argument unfolded in a world where mistakes could be fatal. For most of us, the consequences are slower: burnout, ethical compromise, resentment, or losing the love that brought us to the work.

We’re all fighting that battle. It’s not a tug of war between art and competition. Harmony is not a permanent achievement. Even the most centered person does not solve the conflict once. It’s keeping that joy front and center, so that it makes the competition less about defining who you are to others, and more about exploring who you are for yourself.

The scoreboard can tell us where we stand. It cannot tell us why we began. For that, we have to keep returning to beauty.

-Steve

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