Competition is good. Competition drives. Competition sets and raises standards.

Competition is not for everyone. I know a band director who does not want to teach winning or losing to his students (whether he sticks to that or how well he does with that remains to be seen). He would rather teach excellence, which, in and of itself, is noble. Excellence is something to strive for no matter what one does, whether it’s drumming, golfing, cooking, and even sleeping (yes, sleeping. Ever get a bad night’s sleep? Compare that to an excellent night’s sleep).

The problem with teaching excellence is knowing what standards are excellent. Anyone can self-evaluate and, without having a standard, can call themselves excellent even when the results are poor. Comparing one’s self to a standard allows one to ask themselves a few questions:

“Do I want to be that good?”
“Do I want to be better than that?”
“Am I willing to put in the work to be that good or better?”

If the answer to any of those questions is a hearty, “Yes,” then you’re being competitive.

In my opinion, any time you try to achieve a standard, you’re competing. Not necessarily against others, but against yourself. And any time you achieve a goal – you can finally play 16th note paradiddles at 200 BPM; you can finally play that weird, hybrid rudiment you’ve been working on; you can finally drum along to Rush’s Moving Pictures in its entirety – then you’ve won. You’ve accomplished your goal(s), right? That’s a win. And if you don’t reach your goal and you give up, that’s a loss.

There are people who don’t view individual development of their craft this way, but I do. Mainly because I’m a competitive person. Plus, I think it’s a good way to drive a person to excel and succeed, to know the greatness of success and the utter disappoint of failure, and being able to accept both.

It’s important to be able to accept both failure and success. Failure because you can learn from it, and also because if you don’t accept it it can drive you mad. Accepting success is something you don’t often hear about, but it’s important because successes can lead you to the next step in your development. Not accepting success inversely means that you don’t let it go but instead cling to it. This can lead to stagnation or even a big head (big head = not the good kind of ego).

In viewing individual development this way, I can employ my general concept of competition which is simply this:

Strive for perfection. Strive to win. Strive for first. Striving for any place lower than first might get you to that lower placement, but not to first.

That philosophy can even be parred down to this:

Perfection is an unobtainable ideal, but the journey towards perfection is what matters.

I really, really hate it when competitive groups don’t strive for first place, even when they’re placed as low as 20th and, realistically, have no hope of making such a high climb in a short time. If those groups want to be in first place someday, and someday soon, perhaps that should be doing what it takes to reach first place rather than, oh, say, 17th. It’s ridiculous to me because such goals offer small increments of growth. And while speedy advancement isn’t always the answer, to me slow progress means less things learned over a longer period of time.

This is the same for individual development. If you want to play drums better than, say, Neil Peart, then that should be your goal, NOT to play drums like Phil Rudd, then Eric Kretz, then Neil Peart (no offense to Misters Rudd and Kretz). No. You can always change your goals as your tastes develop, but having an ideal goal then allows you to figure what you must do to meet your goal. What do you need to study? How often do you need to practice? How precise do you need to be? How slow and how fast should you be able to play?

This is how competition has shaped my development in many things. No, I’m not perfect, and yes, there are things I can’t do… yet. But this philosophy ensures that should I choose to meet one of my ideal goals, I can go about accomplishing them without accepting anything less than the goal itself.