When it comes to most activities in our lives, we're generally either competing or collaborating. We're competing against other students to get the highest grade or collaborating with them to get a good grade on a group project. We're either competing against the other team and only shooting for a victory on the scoreboard or we're collaborating with our teammates and getting a victory in the sense of family. We're either competing against our coworkers for the promotion or collaborating with them on a big project. So which one do you most benefit from?

Personally, I benefit from competition as well as collaboration.

In high school, one of my friends and I were highly competitive with one another when it came to our math competitions. We were from the same school and were ultimately working toward an overall victory, but we were more concerned about our individual rankings. For three years (as he ditched me senior year) we went back and forth in these competitions. We pushed each other to want to do our absolute best no matter what. Although we were competing, we sincerely just wanted to see the other one be successful.

Now that I'm in college, I'm finding myself being more driven by collaboration. The field that I'm studying can be very challenging and sometimes, I just need to talk everything through with one of my classmates in order to figure things out. Just these last two days have involved more collaboration than I can recall being involved in for a long, long time. My new friends and I have two classes and a lab together and we know that the other one is going to understand the issues we're having and will help the other work through the aforementioned issue.

Competition and collaboration can also be detrimental, unfortunately.

While I just presented an example of friendly competition, there are always people that are only interested in competition for the win. My friend and I had created healthy competition where neither cared if the other won as long as we both did our best. There will be people that we encounter in one situation or another that will only be interested in watching you fail. They'll do their best work just to make sure that they get the highest grade or the win or the promotion and you get nothing.

Additionally, collaboration can have a negative effect as well. I told of a voluntary collaboration before, but I've definitely had group projects to do that immediately turned south because of the people in your group. The forced collaboration can be overtaken by other people and take the teamwork and reward out of the equation for the end result. It's possible, perhaps, that you won't even bring forth your best effort in the group because of the inability for yourself and your teammates to really work together as one unit. Because of this, you won't get a good grade on your group project, getting a victorious feeling because your team achieved a family feel, or finish that big project for work to the best of anyone's ability.

I know that both collaboration and competition make me perform better when the situations are uplifting. Take a minute to think about them both and really try to determine which one drives you to perform your best work. My advice is to distinguish which of the two more deeply benefits you and try to stick with that particular option as much as possible. This way we can focus more on the outcome of the grade, score, or project instead of how unhappy we are with the situation.