Competition Winner Quotes

Opportunity doesn't make appointments, you have to be ready when it arrives.

Law is made by the winner to preserve victory over the loser.

REMEMBER YOUR GREATNESS Before you were born, And were still too tiny for The human eye to see, You won the race for life From among 250 million competitors. And yet, How fast you have forgotten Your strength, When your very existence Is proof of your greatness. You were born a winner, A warrior, One who defied the odds By surviving the most gruesome Battle of them all. And now that you are a giant, Why do you even doubt victory Against smaller numbers, And wider margins? The only walls that exist, Are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, Exist only because you have forgotten What you have already Achieved. Poetry by Suzy Kassem

Stand up! Don't ever give up on this bitchy life. Feel afraid is okay, but don't avoid competition. You've done that thing even since you're a sperm. You accept this and you are the surviving winner.

You were born a winner, a warrior, one who defied the odds by surviving the most gruesome battle of them all - the race to the egg. And now that you are a giant, why do you even doubt victory against smaller numbers and wider margins? The only walls that exist are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, exist only because you have forgotten what you have already achieved.

There is always competition. It can be direct, or it can be indirect, and you should always be prepared with a plan to fight it.

Women aren't my competition because male attention and sexual objectification are not prizes for me.

To be a champion, compete; to be a great champion, compete with the best; but to be the greatest champion, compete with yourself.

Education should not be a competition resulting in winners and losers. Education should be a competition against ignorance, and all should be encouraged to win.

A winner has more skills than a loser," Vor said, "no matter how you define the competition.

What is life? Life is living in this moment, experiencing and experimenting but experience isn’t life. Life is reflecting and meditating but reflection isn’t life. Life is helping and guiding but philanthropy isn’t life. Life is eating and drinking but food isn’t life. Life is reading and dancing but art isn’t life. Life is kissing and pleasuring but sex isn’t life. Life is winning and losing but competition isn’t life. Life is loving and caring but love isn’t life. Life is birthing and nurturing but children aren’t life. Life is letting go and surrendering but death isn’t life. Life is all these things but all these things aren’t life. Life is always more.

On athleticism, God knows no favor. It seems rather he is in the business of teaching winners how to lose and losers how to win.

Never despair if you have to start at the bottom; not even the sun rises from the top.

Losing teaches you how to win; winning teaches you how not to lose.

When it comes to loving D/ s relationships, the three little words mostly likely to have a significant , positive, and lasting impact on your partner’s well-being is probably “I love you.” Once we venture beyond that simple three-word endearment, however, the competition gets much stiffer. If I had to predict a winner in the four little words category, I’d choose “I believe in you.” When a Dominant believes in his submissive, she eventually grows to believe in herself. That sort of empowerment is priceless beyond measure, and almost always bears sweet fruit.

In the tenth century BC, the priests of India devised the Brahmodya competition, which would become a model of authentic theological discourse. The object was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahman, the ultimate and inexpressible reality beyond human understanding. The idea was to push language as far as it would go, until participants became aware of the ineffable. The challenger, drawing on his immense erudition, began the process by asking an enigmatic question and his opponents had to reply in a way that was apt but equally inscrutable. The winner was the contestant who reduced the others to silence. In that moment of silence, the Brahman was present - not in the ingenious verbal declarations but in the stunning realisation of the impotence of speech. Nearly all religious traditions have devised their own versions of this exercise. It was not a frustrating experience; the finale can, perhaps, be compared to the moment at the end of the symphony, when there is a full and pregnant beat of silence in the concert hall before the applause begins. The aim of good theology is to help the audience to live for a while in that silence.

When the business environment is competitive, it's often strategy and execution that makes the difference between winners and losers.

Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility.

I don't consider those competitions fair where judges get to decide the winner, because selected judges quite often are not worthy or qualified enough to make the right decision.

The men compete in what they do; the women in what they make,’ she said, then smiled, ‘including babies, though that is a very subtle competition, and nearly everyone thinks she is the winner.

According to the competitive exclusion principle, if a reinforcing feedback loop rewards the winner of a competition with the means to win further competitions, the result will be the elimination of all but a few competitors. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

In the competitive game of materialism, there are no winners.

In the presence of the sun nobody sees the stars; excel, and you too will eclipse your competition.

If you are a winner by the judgements of few judges and not by your performance, you are not a real winner.

A true friend does not make you win by making you the winner to the detriment of the true winner. He makes sure that you become a loser, not because he likes the way you fail, but to enlighten you on how it feels to be treated that way and to demonstrate that love and respect are not exclusive.

School competitions give rise to survival of the fittest, producing winners. Collaborations foster growth, innovation, and togetherness. If we prioritize collaboration, we become more than just winners.

The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.

As it becomes easier to monitor informal consumer networks, the winners will be companies that figure out what’s working fastest – and do it more (and figure out what’s not working – and kill it). Zara, a fast-growing retailer in Europe, changes its clothing line every three or four weeks. By carefully watching what’s working and what’s not, they can evolve their lineup far faster than the competition can ever hope to.

Truth is a sport, and winner takes it all. The upcoming truth is under construction.

We don’t judge competitions at the start but at the finishing line! Attitude beats class! Desire beats talent!

.....My race is Photofinish.

In a competition, the person who first discovers the opponent’s weakness and strikes hard is often the winner.

It’s not a contest.’ ‘Yes it is. You just can’t see it because you’ve always been the winner

Winners of some competition are not heroes, heroes are not found in the competition, heroes win much more severe battles than competition to become heroes.

Everything is wooden and beautiful and glossy and perfect and I am just me. Tall and abrasive and too much. Too much ambition, too much competitiveness, too much girl, too much everything.

I feel life today is too competitive to be enjoyable. Even if you don't want it to be, life is one intense competition, and how well you fare in it will determine your happiness and success. Most people just want to look like a winner more than they want to be a winner. I detest the competitiveness that permeates the society and how everything revolves around establishing yourself as a unique individual and honing skills that you can advertise in the market place. Contrary to popular belief, competition is not always beneficial. It adds a lot of unwanted frustration and stress. It can be destructive to one's self-esteem. Competition makes us imitate our competitors and we lose our identity in the midst of it. Why does it matter how successful someone else is in comparison to me? To be honest, I don't really care about being successful now. I just want the freedom to do anything I want without having to worry about social standards.

In business, multiple winners can thrive and coexist. Competition focuses more on meeting customers needs than on demolishing rivals. Just look around. Because there are so many needs to serve, there are many ways to win.

THE SINGLE WOMAN, far from being a creature to be pitied and patronized, is emerging as the newest glamour girl of our times . . . She is engaging because she lives by her wits. She supports herself. She has had to sharpen her personality and mental resources to a glitter in order to survive in a competitive world and the sharpening looks good. Economically, she is a dream. She is not a parasite, a dependent, a scrounger, a sponger or a bum. She is a giver, not a taker, a winner and not a loser.

Leave us alone in the competitive marketplace, and we will tend to you after the winnings are won. The money will be spent more wisely on you than it would be by you. You will have your chance to enjoy our wealth, in the way we think you should enjoy it.

Men are not raised to be intimate, they're raised to be competitive performers. Traditional socialization teaches young boys to filter their sense of self-worth through performance. The paradox for boys is that in order to be worthy of connection they must prove themselves invulnerable, button down warriors in the world's emotional marketplace. In the world of boys and men, you're either a winner or a loser, one up or one down, in control or controlled, man enough or a girl. Where in this set up is the capacity for love?

some seem to get trapped in the compulsion to succeed, others take a rebellious stance. Pointing to the blatant cruelties and limitations involved in a cultural pattern which tends to value only the winner and ignore even the positive qualities of the mediocre, they vehemently criticize competition. Among the most vocal are youth who have suffered under competitive pressures imposed on them by parents or society. Teaching these young people, I often observe in them a desire to fail. They seem to seek failure by making no effort to win

The theme of the winner's circle is adaptability, but at the same time, staying true to your own unique frequency and that's the truth, not only in this competition, but in everything in life; taking those cues from the universe - and applying them - but without losing who you are.

All popular political doctrines charge your brain with various liberal ideas, such as respect for human rights and freedom, toleration, gender equality and so and so forth. However, in the political arena, a candidate with a charismatic personality in the eyes of the masses, has a great advantage over his opponents in political competition. If you want to become a likely winner, cultivate your charisma, make people believe in you and share your opinion, with no regard to what it is. Your victory depends more on your charisma than on the ideas that you follow.

The strangest of all the doctrines of the cult of competition, in which admittedly there must be losers as well as winners, is that the result of competition is inevitably good for everybody, that altruistic ends may be met by a system without altruistic motives or altruistic means.

We can now expose perhaps the most common misunderstanding of Darwinism: the idea that Darwin showed that evolution by natural selection is a procedure for producing Us. Ever since Darwin proposed his theory, people have often misguidedly tried to interpret it as showing that we are the destination, the goal, the point of all that winnowing and competition, and our arrival on the scene was guaranteed by the mere holding of the tournament. This confusion has been fostered by evolution’s friends and foes alike, and it is parallel to the confusion of the coin-toss tournament winner who basks in the misconsidered glory of the idea that since the tournament had to have a winner, and since he is the winner, the tournament had to produce him as the winner. Evolution can be an algorithm, and evolution can have produced us by an algorithmic process, without its being true that evolution is an algorithm for producing us.

The Global Learning XPRIZE competition, which started in 2014, offered $15 million for “open-source, scalable software that will enable children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic within 15 months.” Results from the winners, Kitkit School and onebillion, suggest that the goal has largely been achieved.

I consider minimalism not as a destination but rather as a tool and a mindset to reduce distractions and overwhelm. It is not a competition. You are a winner if you find the amount of stuff and size of your home to be perfect for you and your lifestyle and situation. You only lose if you never consider the potential benefits of decluttering and leave your loved ones with messes and burdens.

I was confident about winning the competition, because it's easy to win things like this when you have nothing else going on in your life. And I was right. Week by week, the competition pool shrunk as people dropped out, failing to attend the requisite three classes. And by the final week, it came down to two possible winners. Me and a woman named Portia. Regrettably, I developed a deep resentment of Portia.

Put another way, the world we believe in becomes the world we live in. If I see the world as a hostile place where only winners thrive, I may well become aggressive, selfish, and grandiose to survive in such a milieu. Later in life I will gravitate to competitive environments and endeavors that can only confirm that view and reinforce its validity. Our beliefs are not only self-fulfilling; they are world-building.

Habitat doesn’t replicate itself. Places get crowded. Creatures go hungry. They struggle. The result is competition and deprivation and misery, winners and losers, unsuccessful efforts to breed and, for the less fortunate individuals, early death. Many are called, but few are chosen. The book that awakened Darwin to this reality was An Essay on the Principle of Population, by a severely logical clergyman and scholar named Thomas Malthus.

Crowdists love “competition” of a fixed nature, where a single vector determines the winner. They do not like real life competition, including evolution, as it assesses the individual as a whole and does not simply rank individuals by ability. For this reason crowds love both sports events and free market capitalism, as each allow people to gain power according to a linear system. The more time you put into the system with the sole goal of making profit, excluding all else, the more likely it is that you can get wealth – and it can happen to anyone! That is the promise that makes crowds flock to these ideas. It is like the dream of being a rock star, or a baseball hero, or a billionaire: what makes it attractive is the idea that anyone can do it, if they simply devote themselves to a linear path of ascension – one that is controlled by the whims of the crowd. The crowd decides who is a baseball hero, or what to buy and thus who to make rich. Control without control.

I've played with adrenalin, almost every dangerous sport you can imagine, but that's not the same as violence, not the same as coming up against someone who wants you dead, where there's no room for one misstep, where it's all or nothing. Feeling that bungee cord whip you up just two seconds from the ground is one thing, looking into the eyes of a man with a knife is another. It's the ultimate competition—there's one life between us, and it's mine. You feel how fine life is. It's a sort of possessiveness. A bit like sex. Just as you can't suddenly rip someone's clothes off in public when you have the urge, you have to train the urge to violence. It's like always singing sotto voce when all you want to do is take a great breath and let it rip. Violence feels good. It's so simple and clear. There's no mistaking the winner. I like it, but I avoid going there, going to the blue place, because I think I could get lost, might not find my way back, I wouldn't want to find my way back because it's seductive.

At least she was good at archaeology, she mused, even if she was a dismal failure as a woman in Tate’s eyes. “She’s been broody ever since we got here,” Leta said with pursed lips as she glanced from Tate to Cecily. “You two had a blowup, huh?” she asked, pretending innocence. Tate drew in a short breath. “She poured crab bisque on me in front of television cameras.” Cecily drew herself up to her full height. “Pity it wasn’t flaming shish kebab!” she returned fiercely. Leta moved between them. “The Sioux wars are over,” she announced. “That’s what you think,” Cecily muttered, glaring around her at the tall man. Tate’s dark eyes began to twinkle. He’d missed her in his life. Even in a temper, she was refreshing, invigorating. She averted her eyes to the large grass circle outlined by thick corded string. All around it were make-shift shelters on poles, some with canvas tops, with bales of hay to make seats for spectators. The first competition of the day was over and the winners were being announced. A woman-only dance came next, and Leta grimaced as she glanced from one warring face to the other. If she left, there was no telling what might happen. “That’s me,” she said reluctantly, adjusting the number on her back. “Got to run. Wish me luck.” “You know I do,” Cecily said, smiling at her. “Don’t disgrace us,” Tate added with laughter in his eyes. Leta made a face at him, but smiled. “No fighting,” she said, shaking a finger at them as she went to join the other competitors. Tate’s granitelike face had softened as he watched his mother. Whatever his faults, he was a good son.

Visualize the success, not the failure. This part is tough for us perfectionists. We have a hard time ever seeing ourselves as winners; our heads tend to go to a place of “Nothing is going right.” Don’t get hung up on the minutiae. Say what you want, out loud, over and over again. Sound crazy? It works. Before I go onto the competition floor, sometimes I look in the mirror and say out loud, “I want you to do your very best, and I want you to be passionate and be in the moment.” Giving myself those marching orders often reminds me to focus on the positive instead of getting lost in what might be wrong (but likely is just in my head).

When equal sacrifices are required, equal rights must be given likewise. This has been such commonplace of thought for a hundred and twenty years that one is ashamed to find it still in need of emphasis. I any case, if this principle is applied in an army, and the great saying about the Marshal’s baton that every recruit carries in his knapsack is not an mere empty phrase, everybody feels that he is in his place, whether he is born to command or to obey. If I give any offence by this, I may add that this would be an army composed entirely of Fahnenjunker. Democratic sentiments? I hate democracy as I do the plague – besides, the democratic ideal of an army would be one consisting entirely, not of Fahnenjunker, but of officers with lax discipline and great personal liberty. For my taste, on the contrary, and for that of young Germans in general to-day, an army could not be too iron, too dictatorial, ad too absolute – but if it is to be so, then there must be a system of promotion that is not sheltered behind any sort of privilege, but opened up to the keenest competition. If we are to come to grief in this war it can only be from moral causes; for materially, whatever any one may say, we are strong enough. And the decisive factor will be the defects of leadership; or to express it more accurately, the relation in which officers and men stand to each other. It would not be for the first time in our experience, and it would be another proof that peoples too (for it is on the shoulders of the whole people, not jsut the ruling class) always repeat the same mistakes just as individuals do. The battle of Jena is an instance. This defeat should not be regarded as a great disaster, but as a just and well-deserved warning of the fate to cut loose from an impossible state of affairs; for in that battle a new principle of leadership encountered and overthrew an antiquated one. Every war that is lost is lost deservedly. One must always bear that in mind if one wishes to be the winner.

If we construct an economy where quantities are controlled, based on the belief there is never enough for all, then we must compete to determine the winners. We begin this with grades in the first grade. There is the presumption that competition is essential and so there must be a normal distribution of grades. All students cannot receive high marks. If I get an A, someone in the class must perform poorly. It is an early lesson in how the marketplace ideology works. In a community organized around abundance, competition will occur, but it is not built into the system as a core design element. In a neighborly culture, the abundance of resources becomes the design element

recorded his family’s experiences year after year. He did so in such an entertaining and original manner that his films have gradually become classics. In Disneyland Dream, the family – father, mother, and three children aged between four and eleven – enters a competition sponsored by the then-new Scotch tape. The winners are to be treated to a trip – by airplane! – to the recently opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Lo and behold the youngest child, Danny, wins first prize with the indomitable slogan: ‘I like “Scotch” brand cellophane tape because when some things tear then I can just use it.’ Excitement all round, and the Barstows’ neighbours step out into their front gardens to wave the family off. Then comes the thrilling

This is not just an abstract point. What I mean is that power has a social function. Its role is not just to enforce domination or to create winners and losers: it also organizes communities, societies, marketplaces, and the world. Hobbes explained this well. Because the urge for power is primal, he argued, it follows that humans are inherently conflictual and competitive. Left to express that nature without the presence of power to inhibit and direct them, they would fight until there was nothing left to fight for. But if they obeyed a “common power,” they could put their efforts toward building society, not destroying it. “During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war,” Hobbes wrote, “and such a war as is of every man against every man.

But Mills also pointed to the common phenomenon known as the “winner’s curse,” in which two companies bid competitively to acquire a third, until the price climbs so high that it becomes less an economic activity than a war of egos. The winning bidders will be damned if they’ll let their opponents get the prize, so they buy the target company at an inflated price. “It tends to be the assertive people who carry the day in these kinds of things,” says Mills. “You see this all the time. People ask, ‘How did this happen, how did we pay so much?’ Usually it’s said that they were carried away by the situation, but that’s not right. Usually they’re carried away by people who are assertive and domineering. The risk with our students is that they’re very good at getting their way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going the right way.

Yesterday while I was on the side of the mat next to some wrestlers who were warming up for their next match, I found myself standing side by side next to an extraordinary wrestler. He was warming up and he had that look of desperation on his face that wrestlers get when their match is about to start and their coach is across the gym coaching on another mat in a match that is already in progress. “Hey do you have a coach.” I asked him. “He's not here right now.” He quietly answered me ready to take on the task of wrestling his opponent alone. “Would you mind if I coached you?” His face tilted up at me with a slight smile and said. “That would be great.” Through the sounds of whistles and yelling fans I heard him ask me what my name was. “My name is John.” I replied. “Hi John, I am Nishan” he said while extending his hand for a handshake. He paused for a second and then he said to me: “John I am going to lose this match”. He said that as if he was preparing me so I wouldn’t get hurt when my coaching skills didn’t work magic with him today. I just said, “Nishan - No score of a match will ever make you a winner. You are already a winner by stepping onto that mat.” With that he just smiled and slowly ran on to the mat, ready for battle, but half knowing what the probable outcome would be. When you first see Nishan you will notice that his legs are frail - very frail. So frail that they have to be supported by custom made, form fitted braces to help support and straighten his limbs. Braces that I recognize all to well. Some would say Nishan has a handicap. I say that he has a gift. To me the word handicap is a word that describes what one “can’t do”. That doesn’t describe Nishan. Nishan is doing. The word “gift” is a word that describes something of value that you give to others. And without knowing it, Nishan is giving us all a gift. I believe Nishan’s gift is inspiration. The ability to look the odds in the eye and say “You don’t pertain to me.” The ability to keep moving forward. Perseverance. A “Whatever it takes” attitude. As he predicted, the outcome of his match wasn’t great. That is, if the only thing you judge a wrestling match by is the actual score. Nishan tried as hard as he could, but he couldn’t overcome the twenty-six pound weight difference that he was giving up to his opponent on this day in order to compete. You see, Nishan weighs only 80 pounds and the lowest weight class in this tournament was 106. Nishan knew he was spotting his opponent 26 pounds going into every match on this day. He wrestled anyway. I never did get the chance to ask him why he wrestles, but if I had to guess I would say, after watching him all day long, that Nishan wrestles for the same reasons that we all wrestle for. We wrestle to feel alive, to push ourselves to our mental, physical and emotional limits - levels we never knew we could reach. We wrestle to learn to use 100% of what we have today in hopes that our maximum today will be our minimum tomorrow. We wrestle to measure where we started from, to know where we are now, and to plan on getting where we want to be in the future. We wrestle to look the seemingly insurmountable opponent right in the eye and say, “Bring it on. - I can take whatever you can dish out.” Sometimes life is your opponent and just showing up is a victory. You don't need to score more points than your opponent in order to accomplish that. No Nishan didn’t score more points than any of his opponents on this day, that would have been nice, but I don’t believe that was the most important thing to Nishan. Without knowing for sure - the most important thing to him on this day was to walk with pride like a wrestler up to a thirty two foot circle, have all eyes from the crowd on him, to watch him compete one on one against his opponent - giving it all that he had. That is what competition is all about. Most of the times in wrestlin

A large brand will typically spend between 10 and 20 percent of their media buy on creative,” DeJulio explains. “So if they have a $500 million media budget, there’s somewhere between $50 to $100 million going toward creating content. For that money they’ll get seven to ten pieces of content, but not right away. If you’re going to spend $1 million on one piece of content, it’s going to take a long time—six months, nine months, a year—to fully develop. With this budget and timeline, brands have no margin to take chances creatively.” By contrast, the Tongal process: If a brand wants to crowdsource a commercial, the first step is to put up a purse—anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000. Then, Tongal breaks the project into three phases: ideation, production, and distribution, allowing creatives with different specialties (writing, directing, animating, acting, social media promotion, and so on) to focus on what they do best. In the first competition—the ideation phase—a client creates a brief describing its objective. Tongal members read the brief and submit their best ideas in 500 characters (about three tweets). Customers then pick a small number of ideas they like and pay a small portion of the purse to these winners. Next up is production, where directors select one of the winning concepts and submit their take. Another round of winners are selected and these folks are given the time and money to crank out their vision. But this phase is not just limited to these few winning directors. Tongal also allows anyone to submit a wild card video. Finally, sponsors select their favorite video (or videos), the winning directors get paid, and the winning videos get released to the world. Compared to the seven to ten pieces of content the traditional process produces, Tongal competitions generate an average of 422 concepts in the idea phase, followed by an average of 20 to 100 finished video pieces in the video production phase. That is a huge return for the invested dollars and time.

Given that our brains were shaped by natural selection, it could hardly be otherwise. Natural selection is driven by the competition among genes to be represented in the next generation. Reproduction leads to a geometric increase in descendants, and on a finite planet not every organism alive in one generation can have descendants several generations hence. Therefore organisms reproduce, to some extent, at one another’s expense. If one organism eats a fish, that fish is no longer available to be eaten by another organism. If one organism mates with a second one, it denies an opportunity at parenthood to a third. Everyone alive today is a descendant of millions of generations of ancestors who lived under these constraints but reproduced nonetheless. That means that all people today owe their existence to having winners as ancestors, and everyone today is designed, at least in some circumstances, to compete. That does not mean that people (or any other animals) house an aggressive urge that must be discharged, an unconscious death wish, a rapacious sex drive, a territorial imperative, a thirst for blood, or the other ruthless instincts that are often mistakenly equated with Darwinism.

Soon, droves of children start to show up, keeping us rather busy. We start tallying up the number of Trolls, Batmans, Lego men, and princesses we see. The most popular costume? Batman and Superwoman with the fabrics and accessories varying from child to child. But my favorite so far is the girl who dressed as Little Debbie, but then again, I may be biased. “I think she might be my new favorite,” Emma says as a little girl dressed as a nurse walks away. “That’s because you’re a nurse, but you can’t play favorites,” I say, reminding Emma of the rules. She levels with me. “This coming from the guy whose favorite child was dressed as Little Debbie.” “Come on.” I lean back in my chair and motion to my head. “She had the rim of blue on her hat. That’s attention to detail.” “And good fucking parenting,” Tucker chimes in, and we clink our beer bottles together. Amelia chuckles next to me as Emma shakes her head. “Ridiculous. What about you, Amelia? What costume has been your favorite so far?” “Hmm, it’s been a tough competition. There has been some real winning costumes and some absolute piss-poor ones.” She shakes her head. “Just because you put a scarf around your neck and call yourself Jack Frost doesn’t mean you dressed up.” “Ugh, that costume was dumb.” “It shouldn’t be referred to as a costume, but that’s beside the point.” I like how much Amelia is getting into this little pretend competition. She’s a far cry from the girl who first came home earlier. I love that having Tucker and Emma over has given me more time with Amelia, getting to know the woman she is today, but also managed to put that beautiful smile back on her face. “So who takes the cake for you?” I ask, nudging her leg with mine. Smiling up at me, she says, “Hands down it’s the little boy who dressed as Dwight Schrute from The Office. I think I giggled for five minutes straight after he left. That costume was spot on.” “Oh shit, you’re right,” I reply as Emma and Tucker agree with me. “He even had the watch calculator.” “And the small nose Dwight always complains about.” Emma chuckles. “Yeah, he has to be the winner.” “Now, now, now, let’s not get too hasty. Little Debbie is still in the running,” Tucker points out. Amelia leans forward, seeming incredibly comfortable, and says, “There is no way Little Debbie beats Dwight. Sorry, dude.” The shocked look on Tucker’s face is comical. He’s just been put in his place and the old Amelia has returned. I fucking love it.

LEADING LESSONS It’s the failures that make us winners. When you win a competition, you celebrate. You are on cloud nine. But when you lose, you learn. In my case, losing Blackpool that first time was the best thing that ever happened to me. I dug deep down and asked myself what it was that was holding me back from achieving what I knew I was capable of. Failure shows you what’s possible. It makes your desire burn hotter. It builds courage, and in the end, it makes the win that much sweeter. I would rather fail at something than regret never trying. Leaders think of failures as experiments, showing them what works and what doesn’t and how to fix things. We live in a world where failure is thought of as something negative: no one likes the idea of screwing up. But what if you could change that? What if you could see failure as a positive? What if you could embrace failure as part of the process necessary to get what you want? Suddenly, the fear of it disappears. I never went into any competition wanting to fail (just the opposite), but after racking up my share of disappointments, I learned that I could deal with it. It hurt and pissed me off at the time, but now I see the value in it. I wouldn’t be where I am today without those failures notched on my belt.

Trump is a complete package of the Founders’ greatest fears—delusions of royalty, appeals to the basest appetites of the polity, populism over small-r republicanism, and vulnerability to the blandishments of foreign powers who so obviously are welcome to corrupt him with gifts or flattery of his ravenous ego. To date, his actions have had the possible check of the 2020 election hanging over him, which has influenced him whether or not he admits it. Trump needs to win reelection to continue his nation-state level, god-tier grifting and to avoid prosecution. He thrives not on a competition of ideas but on the division of the country. Our parties and politics will follow him down, fighting a dirtier, more savage battle until we’ve forgotten what it means to share even the most common baseline with our fellow Americans. The cold civil war is warming by the day. He’s not the only centrifugal political force, but he’s the most powerful. This will only accelerate if he is reelected. There will be no end to his ambition and no check on his actions. He will conclude that he’s the winner who wins, and for him that will justify everything in his catalog of errors and terrors. We’ve learned there is no bottom with Trump, no level to which he won’t sink, no excess he won’t embrace.

beyond them. The Six Diseases If we want to look at how we practice all forms of rivalry, there are six diseases my father wrote about, all of which stem from the desire we have to win at all costs. These diseases rely on being in competition, which is typically where we go in a relationship the moment any discord pops up. When we relate to others in these ways, we are disconnecting from them and disconnecting from our true selves in order to access some form of outside validation. In other words, there is no relationship, no collaboration, no cocreation. There is only the victor and the loser. The Six Diseases are: The desire for victory I have to be the winner. If I don’t win, I’m a loser. If I win, everyone else is a loser. The desire to resort to technical cunning I rely on the power of my wits to show you how great I am. Who cares about people or their feelings as long as everyone can see how clever I am? The desire to display all that has been learned Check me out. I know lots of things. I can speak at length about anything. It doesn’t matter what anyone else has to say (especially if it’s dumb). The desire to awe the enemy I am a force to be reckoned with. Look out! I will wow you to get your approval even if I have to do something shocking and wild to get your attention. The desire to play the passive role I am so easy to get along with. Who wouldn’t like me? I am so unobtrusive and sweet. I will put anything that’s important to me aside to make sure that you see how likeable and wonderful I am. How could you not like me when I sacrifice everything just for you? The desire to rid oneself of whatever disease one is affected by I am not okay as I am. I will perform constant self-work and read as many books as I can and take so many classes to make myself good that you will see that I am always trying to be a good person even if I continue to do lots of shitty things. I know I’m not okay as I am. And I know you know that I know I’m not okay as I am, which makes it okay not to get truly better as long as it looks like I’m trying.

When we left, we were told it would be another month before the winner was announced. Then I felt really discouraged. Friends were telling me that my injuries and my fitness level guaranteed me the cover. I felt the opposite. I didn’t feel I was as fit as the others and I felt like the war was too controversial a topic for the magazine to want to feature a wounded veteran. I had completely talked myself out of even the slightest possibility of winning by the time I was back on a plane to New York a month later to find out the results. My family didn’t believe that I didn’t know already. They thought I’d been told and kept asking me about it. But I really didn’t know. The winner was being announced live on NBC’s Today show. I had made my peace with not winning and Jamie and I were just excited to go to New York and be on Today. We had a layover in Charlotte, North Carolina, and when we landed there I had a voice mail from my friend Billy. His message: “I thought we had to wait to see who won? It’s already out!” I clicked onto my Facebook app and saw that Billy had posted a picture of him and some of his buddies at a truck stop in Kentucky posing with a Men’s Health magazine--and I was on the cover! I was shocked. But even then I was convinced this wasn’t real. Maybe the editors had decided to give the cover to all three of us and we each had a different region of the country. It felt incredible to see myself on the cover of that magazine but I just wasn’t convinced I was the outright winner. Jamie and I got to our hotel room late. I called my contact at Men’s Health, Nora, and said, “I’ve already seen the magazine.” There was a beat on the other end of the line before she flatly said, “We’ll talk about it in the morning.” So Jamie and I went to bed. The next morning we met up with Finny and Kavan and headed over to 30 Rockefeller Plaza for the Today show. I didn’t say a word about what I’d seen. When we arrived, Nora was at the door. I waited for the others to go in before I said to her, “So we’re not going to talk about what we’re not going to talk about?” I was smirking a little but quickly wiped the grin off my face when I saw the look on Nora’s. “You’re not the only person in this competition, Noah. Not everyone knows.” Roger that. I wouldn’t say another word.

Some grant programs are structured as competitions. New York City’s Industrial Growth Initiative, now in its second year, is a two-stage process that requires businesses to attend a growth workshop and then apply for a more in-depth workshop series covering topics like human resources and marketing. The program culminates with a business plan competition, where participants put what they have learned to work and create expansion plans to guide their next stage of growth. The plans are pitched to an audience of judges and business leaders, and three winners split a $150,000 prize. One recent winner was Eric Campione, chief administrative officer for P.A.C. Plumbing, Heating, & Air Conditioning. Mr. Campione submitted a plan to bring the third-generation family-owned business on Staten Island into the digital age with new technology, such as iPads for field technicians. It is about more than money, though.

We all see a different reality and we make decisions based on what we see. Everyone is trying to protect their interests in the best way that they can. The world is commonly viewed as a place where someone must lose in order for someone else to win. It's a competition with winners and losers. You must know, in your own heart, that there is an overriding Love which loves everyone.

Some truly terrible things indeed. He started with a sweaty sock And a rotten tooth from an angry croc. He added a slug to make it slimy, The medicine turned grey and grimy. In there was a lot of stuff, Something looked like mouldy fluff. To this he added a pinch of snot, Plus some toenail clippings to the pot. The potion

The trickiest thing about writing about hospitality is that it requires using the word hospitality. I cringe. Heaven only knows why our desire to spend meaningful time with others is saddled with such a churchy, pearls-and-an-apron sounding word, conjuring up vivid Sunday school images of Mary and Martha. Even though I know Jesus preferred Mary's MO, I always felt like Martha was secretly the real winner of the contest. The fact that I still see it as a competition only further illustrates my need for this lesson in the first place.

Others who found their way to the air via Atwater-Kent were Frances Alda, Josef Hoffman, Louise Homer, and Albert Spalding. Fees to the Met alone ran $25,000 a year. By 1930 Frances Alda was the regular soloist. That year, the first that reliable ratings were compiled, Atwater-Kent had a 31.0, finishing third behind Amos ’n’ Andy and The Rudy Vallee Hour. An offshoot of sorts was Atwater-Kent Auditions, the first talent scout show, heard in 1927 and culminating in December that year. Local competitions were initiated around the country: the five winners from each division (male and female) competed for $5,000 prizes in the finale. Donald Novis and Thomas L. Thomas came out of Atwater-Kent Auditions, but Kenny Baker—who also went on to a notable radio career—never got past the local level. Graham McNamee announced the show.

Highly profitable stocks only beat the market if Buffett’s moat protects the profits. Without the moat, highly profitable stocks will get beaten up by the competition. Mean reversion acts on profits to drag down winners and push up losers. Investors should use some common sense and natural skepticism about profit charts that march all the way to heaven.

Tomorrow I will run more courageously, more outrageously.

Once sufficient concentration and merging have taken place, the winners hope to be free to establish a more orderly form of competition between themselves, one where they create differential advantages for their stores, so that ‘their shoppers’ no longer see one store as substitutable for any other.

In the twenty-first century, the winners will be those who stay ahead of the change curve, constantly redefining their industries, creating new markets, blazing new trails, reinventing the competitive rules, challenging the status quo. To use Charles Handy’s words, it will be those who ‘invent the world’, not those who respond to it. Of course, it requires far less effort to follow in the tracks of the leader than it does to find your own migration path to the future, and there was a time when this was an option. But not any more. Tomorrow’s global markets will show no mercy to the me-too crowd.

Sexual selection has also made male bodies grow according to a higher-risk, higher-stakes strategy. For males there is a higher incidence of birth defects, more death in infancy, higher mortality at every age, earlier senescence, and greater variation in health, strength, body size, brain size, and intelligence. This risky, go-for-broke strategy suggests that sexual competition among males was often a winner-takes-all contest. It was better to take a big gamble on producing the most attractive image during a short peak, rather than aiming to create a mediocre impression over a long period of time.

Classic disruption was industry disruption. Modern disruption is ecosystem disruption. Ecosystem disruption occurs when the introduction of new value propositions impacts competition across industries, erasing boundaries and overturning structure. Traditional rivals pursued the same prize with clear winners and losers; today’s challengers are pursuing different goals and focusing on different metrics as they wage their attacks. Traditional rivals focused on their own execution to gain advantage in cost and quality; today’s challengers assemble new sets of partners to create value in ways no individual firm could hope to deliver.

It is connected with the subject of competition. Please remember that. If there is competition at the core of a person’s interpersonal relationships, he will not be able to escape interpersonal relationship problems or escape misfortune. YOUTH: Why not? PHILOSOPHER: Because at the end of a competition, there are winners and losers.