The Motown Story - Busting Myths About Competition

When we think of the writing process behind great love songs, we imagine artists sitting behind a piano agonizing, putting their head in their hands, staring at a blank page, and crafting each line lovingly with a specific singer in mind. A ballad written for one voice, tailored to the singer's personality and destined to be a hit. Now I want you to think of Motown, the Production Studio that churned out the most prolific love songs in America.

·         Ain't No Mountain High Enough

·         Tracks of My Tears

·         Stop in the Name of Love

·         Please Mr. Postman

·         Sugar Pie Honey Bunch

These, and many more, have scored number one hits between 1961 and 1997, and it was accomplished through creative competition and snatching those crafted ballads out of the hands of the creators. When Berry Gordy started Motown, he based the process on the Detroit Auto factories. He saw what production lines, competitive design, and iteration could do for the final product, and he brought that to music. Until Berry, everyone took the "tortured artist" approach to music - the lone writer over the piano desperately pending the next hit.

Berry saw it differently; he made writers go head-to-head to see who would compose the best hit for the singer. He encouraged artists to outdo each other week by week. He held meetings where his creative team voted for which songs they liked the best, and if a composition didn't fit one singer, he sent it down the assembly line to the next one to see what they could do with it.

When Smokey Robinson, Berry's friend, created the smash hit "My Guy," Berry and the Motown Team challenged Smokey to do it again. Six months later, the team recorded "My Girl" with The Temptations.  In the incredible documentary, Hitsville The Making of Motown, Smokey says this about working under Berry Gordy and his atmosphere of competition. "To be there with a bunch of guys you're competing with and yet there constructively giving you information that could help you, it's cutthroat, but constructive."

As a captain of a ship, Berry was exempt from the competition either. Berry himself put songs he had written against Smokey Robinson's biggest hits to be voted on by his team, and he often lost. According to Berry, competition breeds champions, but you can't let the competition get in the way of the love.

We want to feel in total control over how our work gets interpreted. However, according to Berry Gordy, creative competition lets us innovate. It exposes us to outside talent and opinions, which results in a better end product. So today, we're tackling three myths about getting competitive.

Myth 1: Some people are born competitive, and some aren't. If you're not a competitive person, then that's just the way you were built.

One of the things I want to look at first is how much do we actually compete naturally. This study comes from the Harvard School of Public Health and can be read about in the Atlantic article titled Why We Compete. In this study, they went to students and faculty, and they surveyed everybody they could. They asked if they would prefer to live in a world where the average salary was $25K a year and you are in the $50k range, or would you rather live in a world where you earned $100K, but everyone else has $200K? Most people picked the first one; most would rather live in a world where their neighbors made less than them. To me, that became like the building blocks of my understanding of competition for this episode. Fundamentally, we're all competing for resources. Based on this study, you don't need to have the biggest house; you just crave the nicest one.

There's also a 1947 study by Richard Easterlin, and this has become known as the Easterlin Paradox. Richard was an economist, and he found out that as countries become richer, their citizens do not necessarily become happier. And when he started when he got into the study, he found out that when everyone gets more affluent at the same time at the same rate, no one gets happier. They may get healthier, get more education as they grow, but they will not be necessarily more content. In fact, Gallup Polls found that the max happiness for income level is about $95K per year, and above $105K, happiness actually goes down a bit. So, if you make over $105K, you have to do it around neighbors who make less than that. That's the only way it increases happiness from thereon.

Myth 2: Competition makes people aggressive and mean. So what good could come out of making everything into a competition?

Next, I wanted to find out if a big company contest was going to produce results. How many people can you compete with before it becomes overwhelming? Or is it better to have just one rival? We found an excellent article called How Competition Affects Your Brain by Lisa Evans, and she references a study by doctor Gillian Grove. She found that people doing archery against one person did better than in larger groups. In addition, they found out that they would score higher even when their competitor wasn't present. So, it wasn't just that they scored higher, having a rival, in general, made them more competitive. Also, a 2009 study by Stephen Garcia showed that when fewer people are competing, those said people competed better. In terms of students, the top 20% completed short quizzes faster and more accurate when done against ten other students rather than a hundred. 

And now, finally, we have one last little bit of advice. If you have co-workers or friends who don't like to compete, it's because it's too painful to think of losing. You can get them into competition not by directly competing with them, but just set up challenges for them. They might like little achievements. They might like little things that they reach for, especially in the business world. Give them some soft challenges get used into it.

So just having a couple of really good competitors, people who are competing with you on the same team, that's all it takes to bring everybody up. It does not always turn into aggression and meanness. It can be the very thing to foster new wonderful results.

Myth 3: What if I like being a worrier rather than a competitor? Furthermore, what are the differences between men and women in competition? Aren't we still taught in school that women aren't as competitive as men?

Can we address like the elephant in the room, which is what if I am not genetically built to compete? What about women? How much of it is genetic, how much of it is raising women to be less competitive? For this, I found a pretty good source. There is a book called Top Dog the Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, and it's utterly fascinating. One of the things they talk about is how dopamine works in the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that does planning, thinking, memory, and adapts to all of those things. They found out that a gene variant handles enzymes and will determine whether somebody is a worrier or a warrior.

They found out that worriers, the people that worry themselves sick, have higher levels of dopamine. But when they get stressed, their brains get overloaded, and they freeze, whereas warriors generally don't have enough dopamine. So, day to day, they're more lethargic. It a hard component of whether or not you are a worrier or a warrior, but you can train yourself to be either. If you are a worrier, you can train specifically to manage stress and become accustomed to that particular anxiety brand to manage it better.

Based on research and the same book, women are not as competitive as men. They are not taught to be or genetically built to be competitive. One of the studies they looked at in this to see if it was true was on state legislators. They went to all state legislators and did surveys to determine if they were planning to run again. They found out that most of the women who knew they had a better than 20% chance to win would run. The higher the percentage, the more likely they would run. However, for men, there was almost no relation to their chances versus whether or not they run again. For women, it seems like they want to make sure their odds are good before diving into something. So overall, men are more significant risk-takers and more overconfident.

Another thing they looked at in this book was Wall Street job interviews. They found out that only about 16% of Wall Street Analysts are women. However, on average, the women doing those roles are 7% more accurate at the job. This means we need more of them, but they do not apply. Men would apply for the position regardless of what their qualifications were.

Have you also heard the myth that women aren't as good at math? From the same study, they found that in High School AP Calculus tests, if they put the desired School of Choice question on them for the students to fill out and placed it on the back of the test instead of the front, many more girls passed the test because they were not reminded of the stakes. There's a lot of places that claim women start out good in math but self-sabotage by not feeling like they are good enough. As a takeaway, not playing when you know you are going to lose is something we can learn from women, and playing even when your odds are not great is something we can learn from men. I think we can add both of those to our repertoire.

Final Thoughts

You may be in competition already, whether you know it or not. Subconsciously, the majority of us are basing our wealth, our happiness, and our success on the relative success of our neighbors. That's not necessarily a bad thing either. The Rival Effect shows that putting two people with similar abilities and education against each other can improve the performance of both.

Likewise, people get more competitive and score higher on tests if they think their competition pool is smaller, such as the size of a small classroom or a small recording studio full of artists. And if you're concerned that you're less of a warrior competitor and more of a worrier, well, you can worry a little less.

Stress management and training can make you confident enough to go toe-to-toe with the warriors, creatively speaking. Remember, creativity benefits from competition, not diminishes it. Letting someone have a say in your process can be uncomfortable, and competition can feel like a threat to your agency. But competition breeds a better product. It can force you to try new solutions, pick up new skills, and see through other people's eyes. In short, competition forces us to adapt and evolve. The old saying that not everything has to be a competition is still valid, but maybe the most worthwhile things in life can be.