Saturday, February 8, 2025

I am Extraordinarily Aggressive — Here is How I Hold It from Turning into a Downside

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I’m aggressive, and I hate to lose. After I really feel like somebody goes to be higher than me at one thing, it flips a change someplace deep within me and places me into overdrive.

This is not restricted to the work I do at FutureFund, my free fundraising platform for Okay-12 college teams. I need to be the perfect athlete, coach, household man and software program engineer that I will be. And for probably the most half, this works. It motivates me to try for excellence and hold difficult myself as an alternative of changing into too comfy and stagnating.

However the identical tendency that drives me to excel at this stuff can generally turn out to be counterproductive. My dislike of dropping is definitely so robust that I typically hate enjoying board video games. As you possibly can think about, that may actually put a damper on household recreation night time if I do not hold it in examine.

A number of individuals in tech are like this as a result of it is a aggressive panorama. Possibly it is the identical for you: something you do, you must do 100% — and since you put 100% of your self into one thing, it is virtually unimaginable in your success or failure to not really feel like a mirrored image of who you might be. Like me, you have got a model, and that model is: while you do one thing, you’ll succeed.

The trick is to maintain your sense of competitors wholesome in order that it serves your work and private targets as an alternative of getting in your manner. Here is how I do it — and how one can, too.

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The way in which you reply to competitors is a selection

Not everybody responds to competitors in the identical manner. Individuals are likely to fall into certainly one of two teams after they witness another person succeeding at a objective they’ve for themselves.

The primary group tries to sabotage the success they see in others. They ask how they will shift their competitors’s status in order that it is damaging. That is extra generally accepted than you would possibly assume. We are likely to look down on manufacturers who run apparent smear campaigns in opposition to their rivals, however numerous corporations get away with writing press releases that favorably evaluate their services or products to these of their greatest opponents.

The second group tries to enhance themselves to allow them to match and surpass the success they see others experiencing. They turn out to be motivated to raised themselves as an alternative of casting aspersions on their rivals. This strategy can really feel like much more work, however I’ve discovered that it is also incessantly rather more rewarding.

The primary group’s strategy would possibly work at first — however there are apparent dangers. Not solely can this blow again on you in the event you’re too heavy-handed, however it may possibly additionally provoke your rivals and encourage them to work tougher in opposition to you than they usually would have. However the greatest downside is that specializing in others would not do something to enhance your skills.

The second group’s strategy requires you to be unflinchingly trustworthy with your self and your group about your strengths and weaknesses, which will be difficult at first. However it additionally pays dividends. You be taught the place to speculate your effort and time for optimum features. You turn out to be extra environment friendly and fewer more likely to blame others in your errors, and also you finally get nearer to changing into the perfect you will be at what you are doing.

Associated: Why You Must Let Individuals Fail Now So They Can Succeed Later

Eager to win vs. hating to lose

As soon as you’ve got chosen to encourage your self as an alternative of tearing down your opponents, the following query is the right way to do it. Here is a technique to consider it that is all the time helped me:

It is not nearly eager to win; it is about hating to lose. Should you’re something like me, the frustration of dropping is normally stronger for you than the enjoyment of profitable.

This does not allow you to be a sore loser on these events when it inevitably does occur — you do not need to spoil household recreation night time. However making it a precedence to keep away from unfavorable outcomes is usually useful as a result of it makes you extra more likely to repair the sorts of issues that individuals would possibly let slide in the event that they’re too targeted on their wins.

Certainly one of FutureFund’s main opponents finally went out of enterprise as a result of their help group routinely took weeks to get again to individuals. This concern would have been simple to appropriate, however they let it turn out to be their Achilles heel. Though it won’t have felt essential sufficient for them to repair, it turned out to be essential for his or her customers.

So we determined that certainly one of our non-negotiables could be to reply help tickets in an inexpensive period of time — a few hours or much less. That was simple to decide to, however it had a profoundly optimistic affect on our success.

Take into consideration this within the context of your startup. Staying aggressive means celebrating your wins, however by no means letting your self be complacent about the place there’s room for enchancment.

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You outline what profitable is

Lastly, you want a wholesome technique to quantify and acknowledge your wins. That may be tough as a result of, in enterprise, it isn’t all the time clear who’s profitable. There aren’t any common goalposts that everybody can see.

Here is my rule: competitors is wholesome while you resolve what success appears like as an alternative of letting others do it. Measure your progress by how far you’ve got are available relation to the targets you’ve got set as an alternative of letting your opponents management the narrative and all the time being one step behind them.

Success, for me, is about being just a little higher than I used to be the day earlier than. If you’re in a startup, your product will not be good at first — or possibly ever. However you’re employed to ensure it is higher as we speak than it was final month — or final week, or yesterday. This fashion, you possibly can at the very least be sure to’re on target.

Should you’ve chosen your mission rigorously, this type of progress turns into a significantly better benchmark for achievement than what another firm is doing. You may learn extra about that in my subsequent article under:


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