Competition:Yay or Nay

Today's post is quite obvious, about competition. In our lives, we will and had, come across many competitions in our lives. Whether is it in a musical competition or a sports competition, some of us might had been in it. Ask yourself, whenever you take part in a competition, do you take it very very seriously, as if your life were on the line, or do you take it not that seriously, that it is just another chance to learn and gain experience? Well, competitions are mainly to pit a person or team against another. Also, the main point in a competition is to see how well you perform in a particular environment. Therefore, it is advised not to take a competition too (keyword being too) seriously as we would probably take part in many other competitions later on.

Moving on to the issue of competitiveness in school and between schools. Many parents nowadays are worried that their children might get too competitive and and might not be able to take the blow if they lose. I have to agree that children nowadays are more focused on the result of the competition then on the process of the competitions and the experiences gained by it. The whole main purpose of the Ministry Of Education introducing the SYF competition, track and field nationals and many others, is to let children learn from the competitions and improve on what might have gone wrong in the competition. However, the children have now forgotten the true meaning of the competitions and became competitive, in a wrong way. That is why the parents are complaining that the competitions have made their children grow too competitive, and lack the correct values when in a competition. For example, the children attending the track and field nationals would even jeer at the schools that are rival to theirs. This deviates from the whole point of a competition. Under these circumstances, the children are unable to understand the true spirit and meaning of the competition.

Hence, the true spirit and meaning in a competition is the process, experience and then, the result. It does not matter if you win or lose, it is what you gain from the compeition that counts, and that is where you grow from, by learning, understanding and improving. With that, we become a better person, a more learned person and a more experienced person.