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 with one another. 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 on social media. We see billionaires envy multibillionaires, and famous actors complaining about the Oscar or Emmy that should have been theirs. In my own world of academia, I have witnessed bitter disputes over a few square feet of office space.
Although the competitive spirit may be as natural as breathing air, it does not always lead to human flourishing. On the contrary, left unmanaged, it can create misery for ourselves and others. Fortunately, there is a formula to solve this problem without unrealistically suggesting that we dispense entirely with our competitive urge: Instead of always going for gold, shoot for the bronze.
To expand on the wisdom of Earnhardt, although second place may be the first loser, third place can be the real winner—at least when it comes to happiness and longevity. This conclusion comes from research conducted on Olympic athletes. In a 1995 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, scholars studied the emotional reactions of silver and bronze medalists in the 1992 Summer Olympic Games both immediately after their events and later on the awards podium. They discovered that the bronze winners appeared consistently happier on average than the silver medalists. (The study did not consider the gold-winning athletes.)
More recent research has looked at the life span of all three medalist categories. A 2018 study in the journal Economics & Human Biology tracked the average longevity of those representing the U.S. in the Olympic Games from 1904 to 1936 and found that the athlete whose best performance was silver lived to 72. Gold medalists beat this by a solid four years, living to 76. But first prize in longevity went to the bronze medalists, who lived to 78.
The study had a handy explanation for this discrepancy: “Dissatisfactory competition outcomes may adversely affect health.” In other words, silver medalists see themselves as the first loser because they look up to the top step and compare themselves only with the gold medalists, whereas the bronze winners compare themselves favorably with all the others who never made it onto the podium at all. (It would be interesting to know how long the poor souls who came in fourth lived.)
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This hypothesis is based on a considerable body of literature showing the difference between upward and downward social comparison. When we compare ourselves with those who have more money, power, or achievements, we often feel like, well, losers. What exactly does famous or rich or fast mean, besides having more celebrity, money, or athletic ability than someone else (that is, you)?
That is why people so commonly feel bad about themselves after checking out the lives of others on social media who post only about their victories and celebrations. In contrast, downward comparison makes people feel better about themselves and, thus, happier. In fact, researchers have found that comparing our own circumstances with the unfortunate lot of others is a reliable technique for reducing a negative mood—and not out of schadenfreude or malice but because rewards in life are relative. So, as for the medal-winning athletes, the perception of other people’s position helps you establish your own sense of good fortune.
The worldly happiness strategy of striving for gold every day is foolish. Fixing your hopes for contentment on being No. 1 is about the most precarious approach you can adopt. More likely, you will spend most of your time feeling like a silver medalist: always aspiring, pinning your bliss on a single outcome, but succumbing again and again to the tyranny of probability—and disappointment. Much better, then, to aim for healthy competition in which you do your best without expectation of being the absolute winner. Here are three things to keep in mind as you pursue a happy, bronze-medalist lifestyle.
1. Think Local, Not Global
One of the biggest problems in modern social comparison is the expanding pool of people with whom, in nearly every area of life, you can compare yourself. We are confronted daily with details about the most wealthy, powerful, glamorous, and admired people on the planet. Modern technology offers competing standards that are impossible to meet.
Realizing this and adjusting the comparison pool can help fight the resulting modern angst. Rather than looking at the lives of the rich and famous on Instagram or Hulu, get involved in the lives of people in your local community. Rather than dreaming about giving a concert at Carnegie Hall, go play at your neighborhood community center. Living locally gives us a proper frame of reference for our own accomplishments—one that some scholars contend better matches our ancestral environment and therefore gives us the contentment we need.
2. Don’t Make Your Competition “One and Done”
Competition is especially problematic for happiness when it involves a one-off event, such as the Olympics. We need lots of opportunities to excel, and staking our whole sense of self on one event is likely to result in disappointment. Even if you win, a singular victory means that your greatest moment is immediately in the past. A former star athlete once told me that his biggest trophy was now a source of bitterness. “It sits there on my shelf mocking me,” he said, “because I can no longer live up to it.” Much better, if possible, to subject yourself to contests in a sustained pattern over time. In business, for example, make friendly competition a routine event where sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t.
Perhaps this sounds a little unambitious or unnatural to you, but what I am describing is an actual adaptive strategy in nature. Researchers report this fascinating finding about how young rats play-fight as part of their development. Invariably, one rat attacks first, gains advantage—and could “win” most of the time. But to keep the bouts going, the opponent lets the defending rat prevail about 30 percent of the time. Compete like a happy rat.
3. Contend Against Yourself Instead of Others
One of the problems with most competition against others is that it tends to lower the intrinsic motivation, and thus enjoyment, that people derive from their activities. Decades ago, researchers showed this in such enduring experiments as asking people to solve puzzles and then measuring the interest they reported: They found the puzzles less rewarding when competing against others rather than against the clock. Simply having a time limit means competing against themselves—which is often more fun. The principle at work here is that trying to improve your own past performance provides a sense not of “winning” but of progress.
In case all else fails, I should mention one last way to go for the bronze that comes from the ancient Greeks. The late archaeologist Stephen Gaylord Miller described the funeral games of Patroklos, in which athletes exerted themselves physically and mentally as if to state triumphantly, “I am alive!” If you adopt this approach in your own daily life contests, you will rightfully claim the sweetest prize: life itself. And the only person to whom you will have to compare yourself is you.