Competition vs Collaboration In This Current World?
Collaboration yields more significant benefits than competition. Despite knowing this deeply, we tend to gravitate towards competition with thy neighbor. Is there another way around this?
Until recently, I lived in a small world of my own and in a protective shield. My such living in an oblivious state to the world beyond, has significantly changed over the last 18 months. With the intention of giving back to the community, I embarked my journey into the bigger world. During this time, I was fortunate enough to be a part of NorthSouth and its collaboration with Ashoka. I was able to play a small role in spreading the concepts of “Everyone a Changemaker” through empowering the youth towards young change-making.
Inspired by the concepts of change-making, I started expanding my world even further. Thus began my journey with Welugu in Dec 2020, with mere passion, new enthusiasm, and a different direction altogether. We formed a small team to work together towards our vision. With our significant interests in United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Goal 1 – No Poverty, we were looking to collaborate with similar organizations to work together, assimilate more, and contribute collectively towards the common goal.
As we looked through various resources, we came across a nonprofit organization that has been doing incredibly inspiring, unique, and captivating work. The discussion with the director of the organization, to learn and understand more was insightful and deepening. As we exchanged information, we recognized that starting as a volunteer would be a good next step. Excited about the opportunity, I was going through the policies for volunteers, and unfortunately came across something that put me off. What lessened my inspiration was their consideration of other similar organizations as competing organizations. Without a doubt, the organization’s philosophies were excellent and what they visualize to achieve is alluring. And in this situation, the word competition could have just been related to the language, but it reminded me of a very innate nature of a human being – Competition.
I am generally positive and optimistic but, it saddens me to come across individuals, teams, and organizations that continuously spend time competing with others rather than utilizing to better themselves and collaborate, more so specifically when working towards similar goals.
We have all grown up into this unhealthy competitive world. Competition between siblings, peers, states, countries. Competition for likes and shares on social media, competition for positions of power, and even many times between candidates in the same political parties. Competition for worldly things, power, fame, and more, all for short-lived pleasures, and no real happiness, but reinforcing us to want more without being content. With the advancement of time, along with corruption, greed, and self-defined success, the competition with thy neighbor has just grown exponentially.
Yes, we live in a world of competition, but with who should we compete? Why are we looking at the surroundings to see if our neighbor is moving ahead? When working towards a goal, is it necessary to compete or collaborate?
It is extremely important to recognize with who we should compete. Be it be individuals, teams, or organizations – We are our own (only) competition. With this philosophy, we are only to become the best version of ourselves, befriending success forever. Instead of spending time looking at the surroundings, let’s look deep within us to explore ourselves. When we live with passion and compassion, success will just follow us. Many of us might be exploring the purposes of our lives individually, but we all are also born with one common goal – to evolve and get better than what we were yesterday.
Despite the competitiveness in the world, we can also say with certainty that collaborations are happening all over. The world is continually improving with the contributions of many such people, teams, and organizations. The synergistic strengths are helping to achieve the targets in an effective and an expedited manner. We all know that great things cannot be done alone and what we can achieve together is significantly greater than a mere additive effect. During our journey, we were lucky enough to have learned about many such alliances and personally experience them as well.
In my opinion, we are in the greatest need of collaboration now than ever to make the earth even a better place. We also need every one of us to start looking from a collaborative perspective rather than a competitive one.
