Daily Dose From the Pod: Curious About Why You're So Competitive? Here's Why I Am.
Growing up, words ran like a stock market ticker tape through the halls of our home. We were a family of extroverts whose opinions and feelings would not be contained. We were left-brained and right and trained to be astute and profound. Language was the ultimate throw down.
We also played games, like Scrabble, Boggle, Backgammon, Spades, Poker, and Hearts, and did challenging logic puzzles, jigsaws, crosswords, and cryptograms. More language came with these puzzles and games, but this time in explicit praise or resentment or delight in putting the ultimate loser in their rightful place. Allegations of cheating were uttered as if a joke, but simmered until the believer turned it down.
In this constant exchange of effort for worth, I learned a key lesson when I was quite young: Winning feels good.
Years later, I’m grown and made my way far from home. The mores, expectations, and language have been mine to define best I could. So, I married a non-competitive man, Dan, which has to be related to who I am, except I could not have said any of this to you at the time we fell in love as I did not know it about myself. Yet the allure of puzzles and games remains ever present for me, hard-wired into the only way I know how to be.
Now, Dan does love a challenge, he just doesn’t care who wins, and he’s in fact repulsed by the abject competitiveness that I just thought was normal. Over these 36+ years together our first game was Backgammon, then Scrabble, then Boggle, then Gin Rummy. A few decades ago, it became the Granddaddy of them all: The New York Times Crossword. It used to be we could only finish the puzzles that come at the start of each week, but we’ve worked up to being able to finish them all. He frequently beats me four out of seven times, and every loss just – Gah – bothered me.
Then one day back in 2020, I was on the “Anxious Overachiever Podcast” hosted by Morra Aarons-Mele for the Harvard Business Review. Morra asked me what I did for self care, and I just sat silent for a moment there, unsure, and when I started talking, what I spoke of was games and puzzles without even knowing why, and feeling like I wasn’t answering her question correctly. (Hear it here.)
As I spoke words aloud to Morra, I analyzed what I was telling her, and when I finally deduced some kind of connection between Morra’s question and my strange answer, it surprised the heck out of me. “It’s not just that winning feels good to me,” I told Morra and all her listeners. “When I win, I feel loved.”
When the podcast was done, I raced back inside the house to find Dan so I could relay all of this to him, to explain the competitiveness and its source from within, and why I am the way I am. His eyes twinkled. “So when I beat you at the puzzle, if I tell you I love you, will that work?”
I thought deeply about it, searched my spirit for it, the concept bouncing off my mind like a fast game of Pong, and then I looked him dead in the eye with an unforced smile:
Yes.
So that’s what he did from then on.
Got your own weird relationship with puzzles and games, or with what makes you feel loved? Share in the comments or reply to the email through which you received this.
xo
🤗 Here’s a hug for anyone who loves puzzles and games as much as I do, for whatever reason.
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Your post shined a light on why my husband turns everything into a competition for himself (which, my the way, drives me nuts because nothing is enjoyed in my mind when it's a competition after seven decades of living); it never occurred to me that this was love to him. Thank you for your insight.
Interesting to think about, Julie. While I consider myself as more cooperative than competitive, I do have a competitive streak. We played games a lot in my family, board games and card games. My parents were somewhat detached, but when we played games, it felt like we were connected. Through the years, whatever the emotional scars we carried, we could still sit down and play a game. I’ve been playing one card game (Oh, Hell) for over 60 years. It was one of the first clear signs of my mother’s increasing dementia when she could no longer understand how to play a game she’d been playing since she was a child. When we get together, my brother, sister, and I, we still pull out the deck of cards (now with jumbo print). I no longer care so much who wins, I just like being together.