Competition and Development

One of the things I learned from years of competitive swimming is the following: you should not compete against others. You should compete against yourself. If you are first place or fourth or last does not depend only on how you perform, but on the people who happen to compete at the same meeting. You have no control on the others' performance, so you can only attempt to improve your own time: compete against yourself.
This idea can be extended well beyond sport. It is senseless to compete at school, work, or within family. Simply because each person has different abilities. We all start with different genes, different contexts, different backgrounds. If I try to earn more money than somebody whose family has been rich for generations, I will only be disappointed. And the other way around: If I compare myself only with people with a less advantageous position, I will be fooling myself and will never progress. Compete against yourself: Just try to earn more money than before.
Just as it is unreasonable for an amateur jogger to beat a Kenyan in marathon (or a Kenyan taking pride in doing so), it is unreasonable to compare yourself with any other person. The only reasonable thing to do is to compare yourself with yourself: effort counts more than the outcome. The effort depends on you, the outcome not only...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Past, Present and Future of Cybernetics and Systems Research

Summary of "The Past, Present and Future of Cybernetics and Systems Research" Symposium M at  European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR), Vienna, Austria, April 12, 2012. Organizer: Carlos Gershenson This guided reflection on the challenges and opportunities of cybernetics and systems research (CSR) included initial interventions by panelists Peter Erdi, Helena Knyazeva, Stefan Thurner, Peter Csermely, and Alexander Lazlo. Afterwards, the floor was opened to interventions from the general public and further interventions by panelists. Commentaries were made from a broad variety of perspectives, but several general ideas can be distilled from the discussion. CSR have strongly influenced all scientific disciplines. As an example, the term "system" is used commonly in daily language. One of the breakthroughs of CSR lies in the search of commonalities across disciplines. Even when this was achieved to a certain degree, there is still a lack of
Read more

flocking memes...

Some ideas just came up, after a talk I had with Klaas , who is making a PhD on memetics... In cultural transmission of fads and so on, I've heard that there are models in which the majority imitates an elite, and the elite tries to go away from the crowd, and that gives you the dynamics... The idea is that maybe another way of looking at this phenomenon is to take the analogy of flocking: birds try to keep together (safety, direction, whatever reason), but also keep average distance to their neighbours (not to crash). If we take this mechanism into the memetic space, people will imitate many aspects surrounding them, just because of mirron neurons and the evolutionary advantage of imitation. But the separation is also important, for people assert their individuality with it... This could be seen as taking the inverse of a meme... starting to sounds like dialectics... (who would have thought that Hegel and starlings had lots in common...) Of course in the social context there are m
Read more

PhD thesis: "final" version online

After making several minor corrections, I have a "final" version of my thesis, which you can download here . I should defend it privately on April 20th, and if everything goes well, the public defense would be on May 2nd. Everybody's welcome! Design and Control of Self-organizing Systems PhD Dissertation presented by Carlos Gershenson Promoters: Prof. Dr. Bart D’Hooghe and Prof. Dr. Francis Heylighen Advisors: Prof. Dr. Bruce Edmonds Prof. Dr. Bernard Manderick Prof. Dr. Peter McBurney Prof. Dr. Ann Nowé Abstract Complex systems are usually difficult to design and control. There are several particular methods for coping with complexity, but there is no general approach to build complex systems. In this thesis I propose a methodology to aid engineers in the design and control of complex systems. This is based on the description of systems as self-organizing . Starting from the agent metaphor, the methodology proposes a conceptual framework and a se
Read more