Apparently, Alain de Botton recently said at a TED.com lecture that he felt there was a problem with meritocracy.
It meant that the best would win, which meant everyone else would lose.
And that wasn’t very nice.
I think it depends on how you hold winning and losing.
Do you hold it as a matter of life and death?
Or do you hold it like sport?
I was explainingto some students recently that the fun in winning was beating people who are better than you are.
Anyone can beat people who are not as good as they are.
The fun is in beating people that you shouldn’t be able to beat.
How do you out-think people like that?
That’s real creativity.
Isn’t the whole point of creativity to stretch yourself so that you do things you wouldn’t otherwise do?
Things that, if you stayed within your comfort zone, you wouldn’t even attempt.
Isn’t the whole point to continually grow and move on?
How are you doing to do that unless you compete?
How are you going to compete unless you’ve got something to compete with?
Maybe you compete against other agencies: you try to win against better competition.
Maybe you compete against the establishment: you try to upset the status quo.
Maybe you compete against your background: where you came from, what people expected of you.
Maybe you compete against yourself: your fear of failure, your laziness, your embarrassment.
Competition doesn’t define and limit the game.
Competition provides the energy for the game.
If you decide to help feed the third world, you compete against starvation.
If you decide to promote better healthcare, you compete against disease, or ignorance, or poverty, or greed.
Maurice Saatchi is often misquoted as having said,” It’s not enough for us to win, someone else has to lose.”
What he actually said was, “In order for us to win, someone else has to lose.”
This is a huge difference.
The first quote suggest that the whole point of competing is the pleasure gained from grinding someone else into the dust and seeing them suffer.
The second quote merely states a creative principle.
I have to cross the line ahead of you.
So, if I can’t make myself faster than you, I need to make you slower than me.
This is simply how sport works.
Look at Snooker.
The game is based on scoring points by either potting more balls myself, or forcing you into a position where you give away more points.
That’s what a ‘snooker’ is.
Look at Football.
You win by scoring more goals, but also by making the other team score less.
Look at Boxing.
You win by hitting your opponent more, but also by making him hit you less.
Look at Bridge, look at Darts, look at Ker-Plunk.
Blimey, look at Snap, look at I Spy.
Look at the very first games we start playing as soon as we’re old enough.
Look at Peek-a-Boo.
You play a game with a little baby to see if they can spot you behind your hands.
When they do they giggle.
It’s competitive, and it’s fun.
Years ago, when I was at BMP, one of the copywriters asked me to take her along to play squash.
I took her along to the court, and we started to play.
After a while she said, “This isn’t fair, you keep hitting the ball where I can’t get it.”
I explained that that was the point of the game.
She insisted that it was no fun that way, she wasn’t enjoying the game.
She said we should hit the ball so that we could each get to it, and hit it back and forth.
So we did that for a little while and it was of course incredibly boring.
The same is true of advertising.
If we could guarantee that our consumers only saw our ad today, then we could be as nice and gentle as we liked.
But it’s estimated that each of us sees around a thousand advertising messages a day.
TV, posters, radio, print, online, ambient, PoS.
Quick, name one you remember from yesterday.
Time’s up.
And that’s the problem.
Even if you can name one from yesterday, that’s one out of a thousand.
And that’s the competitive area we work in.
Just getting on the radar.
Beating the other nine hundred and ninety nine ads for attention.
However you slice it that’s competitive.
And you either think that’s fun or you don’t.
If you don’t, you can just play pat the ball against the wall, backwards and forwards, so you can each get it easily.
It’s nice and friendly and uncompetitive.
But it isn’t sport, and it isn’t advertising.
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I was a plane with Alain De Botton once.
He never looked out the window with a sense of wonder at any point.
Worst philosopher ever.
“on” a plane, i mean. before the pedants start!
It’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking apart.
A competition related rant.
I was recently knocked backwards to learn that under 9 year old football leagues were under way without goalkeepers and both sides were declared winners at the end. This is in Australia where they play “AFL” (think cross between rugby, a fight and football…).
The imagined genius by parents or teachers or whoever controls it, was that this was a more “even / fair game” for all the kids!?
I despaired because the principles of competition need to be taught at an early age. Kids need to aspire to greatness or at least success through the competitive spirit in sport from the get go - as Dave is suggesting, it is a good thing. They also need to understand early on that you can lose and learn from it. Sometimes learn more than by winning.
The risk is that these kids will grow up bored with sport (a bad thing in Australia) and lacking the competitive spirit to achieve. Not a good first lesson in life.
My one man crusade continues…
Yup. One has to care first. Motivation takes many forms.
Robbie.
100% agree.
on competition.
when I was younger we use to play basketball a lot. trouble was, there were always older guys on the court. whenever they came we played them and they crushed us. so we were off the court. it was a typical streetball game: lots of trash talking, ‘unfair’ game (like using their 100-kilos bodies to push us), shirt pulling, grabbing, holding etc. what I liked about it was that nobody ever complained. nobody ever cried ‘you cheated’ and stuff. the rule was: ‘if you want to play, you have to beat us.’ simple as that. everybody knew that.
we needed 3 years to beat the worst older team. but in order to beat them we had to learn every trick of the game. but was it 3 years of losing? no, it was 3 years of learning. there’s hardly a victory worth more. and boy was it fun!
When I was in school, I used to tell my teachers, “If I study and pass, what does it show?”
That I studied.
Now, if I don’t study and pass, isn’t that more impressive?
Trouble was, when it came to the crunch, I didn’t impress.
I was doing history and English literature, so it was, to me, just a lot of common sense.
RE: Alain de Botton on airplanes. I was once on a plane, many years ago now, and he couldn’t stop looking in wonder at me! We got chatting - and went out for a few months. He was completely delightful - and actually, is genuinely a bit of a plane nut. So that’s my little anecdote for the day.
Christina.
That’s amazing. So he was actually too busy looking at the plane itself with a sense of wonder that he didn’t actually have time to progress to the wonder beyond.
Alain de Botton. BEST philosopher ever.
Christina,
Was that you he wrote the book about, his first affair: “Essays on Love”?
Hey Robbie, “I was a plane with Alain De Botton once” sounds MUCH more interesting than “I was on a plane with Alain De Botton once.” Sounds more philosophical too!
Sadly, I’ve never met Alain. However, I’d like to proffer an opinion on snooker, boxing and football as opposed to darts, rowing and other one-dimensional competitive sports.
In the first group you are actively preventing your opponent from doing what they want to do. With the second group they are in control of their performance and hence result. (Please ignore any psychological/motivational factors).
I write this, not to bad mouth any sport (I enjoy all the ablove) but merely to highlight a distinction in the nature of sports and suggest that Darts isn’t the same as the others mentioned.
Not everyone agrees with me. Which is a good thing.
Dave, how discrete can we be on the web these days?
The answer is NO, I wasn’t the girl from essays in love - because the book was already written when we met. The good news is he told me that encountr was entirely fictional (so no one to be jealous of) - and that he’d only ever had one airplane encounter, moi. Does he say that to all the girls?! I don’t think so. He’s really sweet and much misunderstood. he’s a kind of uber geek. But to tease him about this, why don’t you go and annoy him on facebook where he hangs out. Incidentally, he now has a gig advising BA on strategy - is he to blame for recent turmoil! hah
Ah Christina,
You’ve shattered my illusions.
That was one of my two tavourite de Botton books.
(The other being ‘Consolations of Philosophy’.)
His other books were too dry for me.
And that’s all I’ll say in case he sends me an angry comment and then apologises in floods of tears and we end up in the papers.
Try THe Pleasures and Sorrows of WOrk. It’s truly brilliant.
Guys, no disrespect but you’re not summarising de Botton’s thoughts very well. Check out his book STATUS ANXIETY and also his PLEASURES AND SORROWS OF WORK - that will give you the real low down and then let’s have another discussion here on them. In fact, I’m just going off to Bloomberg now to hear him speak (Dave, don’t be disrespectful, Christina, stop flirting and boasting!!)
I’m not flirting and boasting! But thank you, we are all dutifully going to trot to waterstones now to buy a copy of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - would you like a commission?
Christina,
Ignore Ramesh, I’d boast if I’d been out with Alan de B.
In fact I’m going to boast about swapping blog comments with someone who has.
I bought S&P of W in Edinburgh last month, I’ll take it on holiday with me as penance.
By the way, AdB is doing a talk in Hackney next week:
http://www.roundchapel.org.uk
Anyone fancy a trip there, shall we all go? Ramesh, Dave, big date?!
Nice idea Christina.
I was going to see him last month at a Church in the city, but I couldn’t make it in the end.
But time and dates permitting, let’s carpe the diem.
no disrespect on de Botton or his fans. but his theories is what I call ‘party knowledge’.
but I only read Status Anxiety (shallow) and How Proust can change your life (blasphemical, since I’m Proust fan).
but according to some replies here it looks he deserves another chance.
Riki,
Can’t speak for the other books, but I loved Consolations of Philosophy.
It may well be coffee-table philosophy but that works for me.
I only want stuff I can use, I don’t want an MA in it.
sorry, what’s MA?
coffee table philosophy works for me as well. if it has some valid, new and interesting point.
but to all who liked Status Anxiety I recommend this book (sorry, don’t know the english translation; here’s amazon link http://www.amazon.com/LEuphorie-perp%C3%A9tuelle-Essai-devoir-bonheur/dp/2253152307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248333399&sr=1-1)
as said before: I’ll check de Botton’s other books.
Sully, there are no goalies in AFL, even at professional level.
It’s just the way the game is.
But I’ve heard of the “it’s a draw” thing happening over here in Ireland too.
It’s worrying, learning how to win and learning how to lose are two important lessons.
Someone who doesn’t get too giddy when they win an account, and doesn’t despair too much when one walks out the door is a handy person to have on board. I would imagine.
Dave, what do you think of agencies going public with ” We won X account”?. Something about the words “we won” irks me.
Hi Riki,
Sorry, I may have sounded a bit snotty.
I didn’t mean to, subtlety doesn’t work in blog comments.
I mix with a lot of Philosophy graduates who can quote theory, dates, names, etc.
For me that’s academic Philosophy, what you do to get an MA (Master’s degree).
They look down their noses at ‘coffee table’ philosophy books.
I like coffee table books because they do what I do.
Take complicated things and make them simple, easily understandable, relevant and useful.
I think that’s what we do in advertising.
I thought that was what you meant by ‘party knowledge’.
Assistanttothebrandmanager,
Your question made me think and I want to write a post about my answer instead of just a short comment.
Thanks for that.
Dave.
no snottines detected.
but to make myself clear: ‘party knowledge’ is a term I use to describe some ‘theories’ or views people usually use just in order to fascinate not to clarify, explain or claim a relevant point.
usually those are half-truths, insinuations, gossips or anything that doesn’t have meaningful ground on facts.
Okay Riki,
But for me ‘party knowledge’ is still really useful.
That’s what I have to do to get your attention before I can start to inform or persuade.
So, in philosophy terms, it might be Descarte’s ‘cogito’, or Locke’s ‘primary and secondary qualities’, or Berkely’s ‘esse est percipi’ or Sartre’s ‘Parisian Waiter’.
These can be just interesting thoughts at a party or sometimes they can lead on to a deeper conversation.
I think ‘party knowledge’ opens the conversation, gets it on the radar at least.
Maybe 50% of the time it ends there, maybe 50% of the time it doesn’t.
But it creates an opening where one may not exist otherwise.
It feels like doing ads for me.
Georgie Best used to create openings that weren’t there otherwise.
http://ex-blank-page.blogspot.com/2009/07/in-reply-to-daves-great-posts-64.html
Was thinking over what you said about ‘no fun beating someone worse than you’ (words to that effect).
Seems to apply to awards to.
I mean, we often hear people say, “oh, this guy knows what will win”.
(Often that’s just misplaced confidence.)
But the point is, it’s ‘easy enough’ to do something that’s trendy.
That the judges would love.
But how much satisfaction is there in such wins?
Think when the old ‘refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach’ ads first ran, they got zip at awards.
Because it was so original the judges didn’t see the beauty.
Similarly, when HHVL first started, they had poor showing at awards.
Of course, these days, everything is short-term.
Sad, huh.
dave says: 23 July 2009 at 9:37 am
Okay Riki,
But for me ‘party knowledge’ is still really useful.
Okay Dave, you’ve talked me into it. I was with Riki at first. Not so enamored of clever catch-phrases (I spend too much time tuning out consultant-types in my line of work), but it is the facile epigrams of pop-management lit that really drive me up a wall.
But I’ll take your point that you need to be able to sell you idea quick and concisely, anywhere at any time, if you are ever going to get to second base. It’s the famous “elevator pitch” we all have honed.
But you better be able to back it up. That is where most of the facile, small, philosophy falls flat. No there there, if you know what I mean, in all too many cases. That feeling that this party is a waste of your time (ears).
All good debate on competitiveness.
It makes me think of the broader creative approach under much discussion at the moment. What irks me to the spine, is the word and concept of “Brainstorming” and that there are no “bad ideas”. I’m sure the Post It Note people are great fans of it, but I’m not.
In a similar way to when you are under competitive pressure you learn and perform at your best, I think it is also true that when you are constrained to think of a problem by rejecting ideas, you get better solutions. It’s great fun in Brainstorms with lateral moderators (the types who’ve never had to follow up the fanciful ideas…), to say “no” to some far fetched unrelated ideas. And arguably more constructive.
I think that the internal creative process works best under competitive pressure, but too often we see too little of it. Just say “NO”.
(PS Assistanttothebrandmanager - got you on AFL, I was meaning “soccer”…)
When I hear win/win I think about the process more than the outcomes. With win/lose one claims value at the expense of others. And to some extent, that’s life, tough xxxx.
Competition is natural, necessary and valuable.
Win-win process is about working together to create value.
If you fight against each other to claim value, you get a net-zero sum gain, what you win, another loses.
If you collaborate to create value, the net sum is greater than any possible individual gains.