What activity, task, or game most brings out your competitive streak?

I’ve never been very competitive. I have been related things before however. I’ve been impatient, I’ve been disappointed, but mostly it’s because I don’t measure personal success just for myself, but rather did I help anything greater than myself improve? That’s what I’m most proud of, not the little personal wins, but the huge towering wins that an entire band of people can claim working together. I rarely have these feelings mind you, so infrequent I do treasure them when they come.

Mostly I don’t follow sports or engage much in game play. The only guilty pleasure I have is Letterpress, but even in that game I’m not lusting after winning, or even smurfing my opponents. I’m much more apt to enjoy a long game where people leave the obviously difficult-to-play character alone, say a lonely Q, Z, or X and spend the rest of the time trying to assemble words to move the game along. In many ways, the way I play a game is a lot like that saying you’ve heard about enjoying the journey more than the destination when you are going someplace new. The destination is rarely as rah-rah as the journey it took to get there. Unless you’re speaking about Paris, in that case, it’s the opposite.

I try not to play with overly competitive people because if I win, they lose poorly and if I lose, they gloat. They are usually poor losers and poor winners. The best response to winning a game is to offer the loser to play again. The best response to losing a game is to offer the winner to play again. Again it’s not about the number of right or wrong, win or lose, but in how much fun you had. Life is a lot like Who’s Line, the games are made up and the points don’t matter.