life on planet earth on Competitions

The city of Corinth was famous for the Isthmian Games, a festival of athletic contests and events similar to the Olympic games. At the end of each contest or event, the athletes would appear before a ...

Professional football players often get heated on the field, sometimes letting their emotions get the best of them when penalized by an official. Art Holst, a longtime NFL referee, recalls a Sunday ga...

All kinds of competition are comparisons of the abilities or performance of one person or team to that of another. From elementary school spelling bees to professional sports, contestants compare thei...

Everything we do is about winning something or measuring one person against another or garnering goods in great quantity, not because we need them but in order that others can’t have them. We make lif...

Unable to value, unable to enjoy.

If a man is forever concerned first and foremost with his own interests then he is bound to collide with others. If for any man life is a competition…then he will always think of other human beings as...

A person may fight ferociously to win success, to be better than everybody else, and then one day find it all seems empty and meaningless.

The lesson that games can teach us is simple. Games aren’t appealing because they are fun, but because they are limited. Because they erect boundaries. Because we must accept their structures in order...

During the ancient Greek Olympics, the judge of the contest sat on an elevated seat. After the contest was over the competitors came before him to receive their rewards. This was not a judicial bench ...

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper.

Performance-enhancing drugs are a major problem in the sporting world. Cycling, baseball, weightlifting, football—athletes at the highest levels need something to put them over the top or keep them in...

Trials are the ruler and scale to reveal in our lives.

There was a story going around about the Special Olympics. For the hundred-yard dash, there were nine contestants, all of them so-called physically or mentally disabled. All nine of them assembled at ...

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

Striving for excellence versus striving for superiority. Striving for excellence means striving to become better in some regard, to improve, or at least not to get worse, especially as we age;47 it is...

As a young boy, around the time my heart began to suspect that the world was a fearful place and I was on my own to find my way through it, I read the story of a Scottish discus thrower from the ninet...

I recently heard a story about a race in which one runner had a significant lead over the rest of the field. As the man rounded the final turn, the crowd roared as he inched closer and closer to the f...

Souls are like athletes that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers.

Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.

Companies in this era of apps and personal tracking devices have grown much smarter about surfacing milestones that were previously invisible. The app Pocket, which stores articles from the Internet o...

Few men have the natural strength to honor a friend's success without envy.

We swim in an ocean of feedback. Each year in the United States alone, every schoolchild will be handed back as many as 300 assignments, papers, and tests. Millions of kids will be assessed as they tr...

Relationships are a large playing field upon which other life contests and struggles get worked out.

Two theaters compete for our gaze: the theater of sin on earth and the theater of glory where Christ is.

Trials are intended to make us think, to wean us from the world, to send us to the Bible, to drive us to our knees.

In the sport of cycling, one of the most important things necessary to be successful in a race is the ability to manage the timing of when “to burn a match.” This is a phrase that all bike racers know...

In the dust of defeat as well as the laurels of victory there is a glory to be found if one has done his best.

We want everyone around us to believe we have it all together—and we don’t. We fear everyone else is living the lives they post and we are the only imposters. And so, the race is on. The race to perfe...

The pressure to succeed is greater than it has ever been—People feel that they must pursue that goal been…people feel that they must pursue that goal even if it means crawling over the bodies of cowor...

A productive disagreement yields fruit: the fruit of security, by removing a threat, reducing a risk, resulting in a deal, or concluding with a decision; the fruit of growth, by revealing new informat...