Tighten your seatbelts — you’ve heard this one before. Nice people finish last. Before we go into it, let me throw some names into the mix. Andy from Devil Wears Prada. Dr Leonard Hofstader from Big Bang Theory. Steve Rogers or Peter Parker from Marvel. They all did well for themselves in the end. They are nice people. I’ll take a few more names: Roger Federer. Sachin Tendulkar. Usain Bolt. Smriti Mandhana. Saina Nehwal. They are champions in their respective sports.
I’ll point to the incident between England and Australia in the Lord’s test during the Ashes (yes, the ‘Spirit’ of cricket Bairstow runout). The Aussies were there to win — they did not withdraw their appeal, which would have been the ‘nice’ thing to do. Would they have lost if they played nice? Potentially. But perhaps not. We will never know.
Sport is a hyper-competitive space, but so is the boardroom of a Rs 1,000 crore net corporate or the local bazaar where someone is lowballing prices and stealing customers. Conventional wisdom says that the ‘nice people come last’ trope holds true regardless. Much like most things, reality is a bit different.
Different types of competition
When we think of competition, we think of a few words: ‘opponent’, ‘enemy’, ‘rival’. This prompts what we call ‘outgroup’ competition, where it is my group, my team, my country versus another. This is what you would commonly think of when the word competition comes up. Winning and getting one over the outgroup is very important in this case. Whether we like or agree with it or not, every athlete quickly learns the one rule of elite sport: winning is important. Let’s be honest, we all like to win, and love a winner with big smiles, top step, trophy aloft, champagne spraying, cameras flashing. These images are plastered everywhere. Problems start when that changes to ‘winning is everything’.
There’s a saying, “You can enjoy yourself with the trophy.” We hear variations of this all the time. “You can enjoy yourself with a high-paying job.” Being relaxed and enjoying the process is often seen as a sign that we are not taking things seriously. This type of constant competition is usually detrimental to learning and development. It is good for short-term success, but not for long-term development. We make people medal machines. Outcome machines. In doing so, we lose out on the things that allow learning and development along the way.
“When there is a high level of ingroup competition, there is an automatic switch to ‘self-survival’ mindset.”
The other kind of competition is ‘ingroup’ competition. This usually happens when the ‘winning is everything’ tagline becomes the rulebook and there is an active fight between members of the same team, group and country at an unmanageable level. Think of a co-worker who snitches to your boss about you leaving 30 minutes early to go on a movie date or an athlete not sharing the ball with another in training because they are afraid of losing their place in the team. When there is a high level of ingroup competition, there is an automatic switch to ‘self-survival’ mindset. Individuals will do anything to retain their status, position and place — even if that means not doing what will help the team win.
Nice teams don’t come last
Nice team environments or facilitative environments create successful teams. They create the dynasties of champions in sport. Think Australian cricket from 1996 to 2005. Think Chicago Bulls of the 1990s. Think Sir Alex’s Manchester United squads. Think Indian Cricket 2006 to 2014. These teams did not have a high level of ingroup competition that caused insecurity. Every person who has tried to do something big will know you will not win all the time. These teams were nice teams because they had solid ingroup support. They tried new things. Sometimes they failed. But they were not worried about being penalised and shunted away for trying new things.
When ingroup competition is unchecked, it leads to a negative triangle of fight for survival. The constant competition where one person is trying to beat their own teammate often means there is no skill development. Think about it: if all your effort is to constantly get one over someone, you will probably not enjoy the things you are doing most of the time. You will always compare. Every failure will feel fatal. This creates doubt and insecurity.
“Being nice has nothing to do with being a competitor and a high-performer.”
Beyond performance sports, we see this (rather worryingly) happening in schools. Research consistently tells us that the first five years of school are for learning and social skills (and fun!). Yet, students as young as five are burdened with tests. Similarly, U-9 level children who are participating in sports are forced to think about winning, when they barely know how to play the sport. Between this constant insecurity and unchecked competition, people are forgetting the development of the individuals.
Nice people don’t come last. Being nice has nothing to do with being a competitor and a high-performer. If you have any doubt, go through the names in this column. Every single one thought of their coaches, their teammates and their sport as much as they thought about themselves. Even if you disagree, remember this: nice people are not destined to come last, jerks are not guaranteed to come first either.
Dr Sahen Gupta is a Kolkata-born, India- and UK-based psychologist who divides his time between mental health support and high-performance coaching. As the founder of Discovery Sport & Performance Lab, he works not only with Olympians and other top-level sportspersons, but also with CEOs and other professionals striving for excellence. Dr Gupta’s mission is to simplify complexities of the mind into actionable and simple ‘doables’ that allow individuals to be mentally fit.
