Today's
quotation:
Competing
against each other leaves little space for reciprocity and
the growth of social capital. Running against another in a race may
benefit our speed, but jointly organizing the sports day produces
cooperation and trust. There are many situations where cooperation
and reciprocity are more effective than competition. Civic virtues
come
from building on what we have in common rather than by using our
differences to create in-groups, out-groups and fear-driven
competition.
Eva Cox
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Today's
Meditation:
It would
be really nice if we could cooperate with each other much
more often. And we can-- we see evidence of a great
deal of cooperation every day on our roadways, where the
vast majority of people are cooperating to an amazing
extent in order to stay safe-- and thus keeping others
safe. It's great to compete sometimes, but if we
truly want to build a better world, then we must focus on
cooperation rather than competition.
But
cooperation often means compromise, and many of us feel
that any sort of compromise means that we've
"lost." We tend to think that we know the
best ways to do certain things, and cooperation often
means doing something someone else's way. Often,
we're not willing to do that.
If
all we do is compete, though, what's going to happen to
learning from other people? How are we going to
understand different ways of looking at the world?
How will we be able to accomplish great and innovative
things-- which almost always require groups of people
working together-- instead of continuing to do things the
same ways that we've always done them?
I've
competed a lot in many different ways, but my experience
has taught me that with cooperation, we get much, much
more done, and we do it better-- as long as we truly
cooperate. We have many, many examples of wonderful
things done through cooperation-- roads and buildings and
electricity and cleaner rivers and lakes, etc.-- so let's
look to those examples and decide to cooperate with others
to get things done. Then we'll all learn more and
grow more, and our contributions to the world will be much
stronger.
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