149The poet William Butler Yeats used to be amused at
how many definitions people came up with for happi-
ness. But happiness wasn’t any of the things people said
it was, insisted Yeats.
“Happiness is just one thing,” he said. “Growth. We
are happy when we are growing.”
A good competitor will cause you to grow. He will
stretch you beyond your former skill level. If you want
to get good at chess, play against somebody better at
chess than you are. In the movie Searching for Bobby
Fisher, we see the negative effects of resisting competi-
tion on a young chess genius until he starts to use the
competition to grow. Once he stops taking it personally
and seriously, the game itself becomes energizing. Once
he embraces the intriguing fun of competition, he gets
better and better as a player, and grows as a person.
I mentioned earlier that I’d heard a report on the ra-
dio that there was a Little League organization some-
where in Pennsylvania that had decided not to keep score
in its games anymore because losing might damage the
players’ self-esteem. They had it all wrong: Losing teaches
kids to grow in the face of defeat. It also teaches them
that losing isn’t the same as dying, or being worthless.
It’s just the other side of winning. If we teach children
to fear competition because of the possibility of losing,
then we actually lower their self-esteem.
Compete wherever you can. But always compete in
the spirit of fun, knowing that finally surpassing some-
one else is far less important than surpassing yourself.
If you’re better at a game than I am, when I play
against you and try to beat you it’s really not you I’m
after. Who I’m really beating is the old me. Because the
old me couldn’t beat you.
Get up a game