We all have role models. People to look up to. Often times those examples portray a single defining trait. Other times you can find more than that. Either way there is one characteristic that can often be more telling than the others. That characteristic is competitiveness.

These people do not settle for being on par with everyone else. They understand their own potential and often times try to reach above that. In school, these are the people that complain about getting a B as doing better. Sometimes you can even hear someone be bothered about getting an A-, because they know that they made errors that they could have avoided. This might sound like these people are stuck-up or rubbing it in, but the fact is that their expectations for themselves create these reactions. It is pretty likely they don’t even have you or your grade in mind when they display these moments of self-conflict. People like this might be content with their high grade, but they know that it could have been at least slightly better than what it was, and this demand for performance is an admirable trait for anyone to look up to.

Maybe these types of people annoy you, or maybe you are one of these people and you feel like annoy others. If you feel either of these things, you are wrong. Being competitive is a natural thing to do. Humans were meant to be competitive, that is an animal instinct that predates our civility. It appears in the same grouping of basic instincts with things like being territorial, or jealousy of a partner. Of course, no one wants an overly competitive person on small, unimportant things like board games or scenarios where it ruins the fun. But when it comes to the bigger things, a competitive person is just playing on their human roots to be the best at what they can be.

However, despite all the reasons that competitiveness is an admirable trait. It can, obviously, be a distasteful one. Some people competitive at inappropriate times, as stated before. Other times the competitive person does it for the wrong reasons, such as wanting to have ammunition to put others down, or to feed into their own egos. These situations misrepresent the admirable trait of competitiveness, because that trait must also be carried humbly. Those people do not push the boundaries of their own self-expectations, because their only concern is besting others and their standards.

The model of competitiveness must carry other qualities that complement the trait, but when someone has those qualities they become a meeting point of passion and performance that we can all look up to. They reach the frontier and blaze a trail, leaving us to watch as their ambitions take them to new and exciting places. In a world of where entertainment sports continue to grow in absurd amounts, we only need to focus on one competition to be like those people.

That competition is against ourselves.