Competition is a good thing. It pushes people to perform better, companies to make better products, and prices to drop.

So I was taught.

But reading Peter Thiel’s Zero to One brought a new perspective that I wasn’t expecting.

Competition, while being very helpful for companies to make progress, serves very much as a negative reinforcement rather than a positive one. The mindset is, “If we don’t make progress, we’ll be put out of business.” What results is a race to the bottom, bidding for the lowest price in an attempt to retain the control over the market.

The race to the bottom is nothing more than who can cut the most costs, production time, and other factors of business. This leads companies to borderline unethical if not unethical practices to minimize operating costs so that they can further lower their prices in order to beat competition.

The parallels between competition in education and competition in business is strikingly similar. When a student isn’t focused on performing better than their classmates, they are able to focus on being creative and unique. Students are then able to define what it means to win in their own game, rather than how not to lose at someone else’s.

The mark of a truly effective and powerful education system is one in which cheating isn’t even a temptation for students, because the desire for learning and creativity become so much more powerful than the desire to merely obtain an external result.

What does the opposite of competition look like?