Simon Sinek explains how a worthy rival exposes your weaknesses and pushes you to improve. He shares a story of turning a hostile professional rival into a collaborator, then contrasts finite competition with an infinite mindset of continuous improvement. Apple had IBM and Microsoft; you need someone who makes you better.
Chapters
Worthy rival.
There's another guy who does what I do. He gives talks, he writes books. He's extremely well respected. He does very good work. I like and respect his work as well. I just happen to hate him.
It's nothing personal. He's always been very kind and respectful to me whenever I've seen him at engagements, and yet I irrationally hate him. And because of my hatred for him, I am very competitive with him. And I will regularly go online and check my book rankings and then immediately go and check his. Mind you, I don't check anyone else's, just his. And if I'm ahead, I'm smug. And if I'm behind, I'm angry.
We had the opportunity to. To speak at the same event together. And I don't mean me in the morning and him in the afternoon. I mean, we were interviewed together on the same stage at the same time, and the interviewer thought it would be fun if we introduced each other.
And so I went first.
And I turned to him and I said.
You make me incredibly insecure. All of your strengths are all of my weaknesses. And whenever your name comes up, I get extremely uncomfortable. And he turned to me and he said, funny, I feel the same about you.
It turns out the reason I hated him so much had nothing to do with him, had everything to do with me. It's because his strengths revealed to me my weaknesses, and that made me feel insecure. And it was easier to channel all of that energy against him. It was easier to channel all that energy into trying to beat him in order to make myself feel better, rather than to take a hard look at myself and say, I've got some work to do. The funny thing is, that was such a cathartic experience for both of us that we've actually become very close friends and now we work together on a regular basis because it turns out people can buy more than one book.
And it turns out that even easier than working on my weaknesses is simply to partner with somebody whose strengths are my weaknesses, and vice versa. In other words, you have to have worthy rivals. When we have competitors in business, we adopt this mindset of needing to win or needing to beat them. The problem is, this is not a finite game. There's no such thing as winning because we haven't agreed upon any metrics. We haven't agreed upon any time frames. You get to choose the metrics that you've declared that you're the winner or you're ahead. It's totally arbitrary. Is it based on revenues? Market share? Is it Based on who has more followers on Twitter? No, no, it should really be based on who has more followers on Instagram. Like we get to choose. In other words, the whole thing is ridiculous. A worthy rival is another player in the game that is worthy of comparison, that in some way, shape or form reveals to you weaknesses that you have that are opportunities for you to work to improve yourself. You get to pick your own worthy rivals. You can have many of them. They can be entire companies, they can be individuals. They don't even have to be in your industry. But there are people that you respect. You don't have to like them, but you respect that they are better at things than you are. And it shows you where your opportunities to improve are. And remember, in the infinite game, the only true competitor is yourself. And if the game of an infinite mindset, if playing with an infinite mindset is a game of constant improvement, what better way to discover your weaknesses than from those who are better than us at so many things? Respect your worthy rivals and adapt as they fall out of the game. In the early days of the PC, Apple's worthy rival was IBM. Apple were the pirates and IBM represented the Navy. Apple represented the rebels and IBM represented the status quo that they were fighting against. But then IBM fell out of the game. That didn't mean Apple had won. It simply mean that the other player had fallen out of the game. And so they were replaced by Microsoft. Apple now represented the pirates and Microsoft represented the Navy. Remember, hi, I'm a Mac, I'm a PC. It was this us against them. And then Microsoft was no longer a worthy rival. And now it's Google and Facebook and companies like that. And the fight is no longer about necessarily personal computing or the status quo, but now it seems to be about personal privacy. And still Apple seems to be representing the individual's concerns more than the corporate's concerns. In other words, their just cause is still alive and well. It's just operating in a different way. And they use their worthy rivals to not only reveal their weaknesses, but to keep them on the straight and narrow. Who are your worthy rivals.
