The Triumph of Coming in Third
Treating competition as all-or-nothing will never make you as happy as simply doing your best and finding satisfaction in that.
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“Second place is just the first loser” is an aphorism widely attributed to the legendary NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt. Or as my late father put it, (mostly) jokingly, “It’s not enough to win. Your friends have to lose too.”
We may not want others to know we think this way. But think this way we do, because humans are born and wired to compete . What was probably an evolutionary trait derived from a chronic scarcity of resources in our premodern past, the need to win still manifests in many areas of life, sometimes in absurd ways. People jockey for position in line to get on an airplane. They compare how many “likes” they have
