About a year ago, MyMachine Co-Founder Piet Grymonprez was personally asked by Arianna Huffington if he wanted to write for Thrive Global. His latest article “Competition is old-school.-The challenges we face aren’t ones that can be ‘won’, and certainly not by individual efforts.” is published today.

In his article, Piet makes a strong case on the toxic link between competition and the educations system. “From industry to education, there seems to be a widely held belief that winning is a force for good. Something to which we should all aspire. Yet, I don’t think this idea serves us well. If anything, it holds the vast majority of us back from reaching our full potential. Unless we shift the paradigm.”

“Standardised tests rarely acknowledge 21st-century skills, let alone reward them. Instead, they demand a form of convergent thinking based on unequivocal answers to speed up the correcting of the exams. This has a profound impact on student and teacher performance. And this approach is not helping us in life. The world we live in is complex, and we should embrace that. There’s almost no simple right/wrong axis to it, but mainly lots of related parameters whose mostly invisible mutual relationship is the cause of many contingencies. Lineair thinking is therefore poor preparation for this complex personal and professional endeavour we call life.”  “While focusing on winning motivates some, it actually demotivates the vast majority of people. It takes us to a space where we divide the group into one winner and a clear message to all others ‘You are a loser’. As a result of this conditioning, there’s a high risk of ending up struggling with serious self-esteem issues for many years. Many of us not seeing ourselves as good enough, smart enough, beautiful enough, or successful enough.”

While this article is not written in his capacity of co-founder of MyMachine, one could argue that this article doubles as a motivation why MyMachine is not a competition.

You can read the full article here: https://thriveglobal.com/stories/competition-is-old-school/