The Rival in Your Head
When I build a sales team, the first thing I design into it is competition. Three or four hires at once, same start date, same onboarding, same quota, same comp, and randomized leads so nobody gets a better territory. Then I let them race. The goal is to find out, in ninety days instead of eighteen months, what each person is actually capable of.
When I coach founders, I spend half my time talking them out of competing.
Competition is a powerful force. It can bring out someone's absolute best or absolutely undo them. Which way it goes looks like a question of character. It’s mostly a question of design: the kind of competition decides more than the person in it.
Competition with limits brings out your strengths. The confines of a named opponent, a real prize, and a finish line organize your focus and your skill. That’s why the sales cohort works. They have a goal, competitors, and a finish line. Under those conditions, people do their best work.
Strip away those limits and the same force turns against you. Instead of showing you what you're capable of, it undermines your confidence and your ability.
You don't end up in a limitless competition by bad luck. The world only ever hands you limited competitions. A race without limits is one you created, and it's your choice whether to play that unwinnable game or not.
Distinguishing between them isn’t always easy. But looking for the limits will reliably tell you what kind of competition you’re in.
I worked with two founders who both told me they were racing to take their market, and running out of time. The first founder's market was consolidating. His biggest competitor had just been bought and was being shut down, and three or four companies were playing chicken to see who would take the market. There would be one winner and a strong second.
His confines were real:
Competitors: three or four companies whose strengths and weaknesses he could name.
Prize: the shut-down competitor's customers were up for grabs, and winning meant being the product they landed on when they went looking for a replacement.
Finish line: his customers show up once a year, and the market would be settled by the end of that season.
He could define the competition in a single sentence: "We're at the front, but if we can't ship product — and that other competitor I know is shipping like a machine — they're going to win."
At first, the second founder could also name the limits of his race. Real competitors were circling the customers he wanted, and he worried one of them would pull ahead for good. But as we went through the specifics, they began to dissolve.
Competitors: we went through the other companies one by one, and he wasn't worried about any of them in particular. He was worried "someone else" would come along and get there first.
Prize: being the first. This can be a real prize if you're teaching people to do something they've never done before. But first-mover advantage didn't apply here. Winning had a feeling to it, but not a concrete definition.
Finish line: he gave himself a year, but without a clear destination the finish line was arbitrary. In a real competition, the deadline is determined by factors out of your control.
The pressure he was under was real. When you start a company, nobody tells you whether you're doing it right. But the specific competition was not.
Even when the competition isn’t real, the cost of competing is.
A real competition demands something specific from you. For the first founder, that was speeding up shipping. His energy was directed toward a specific goal: ship forty percent faster, before the buying season, to capture the customers up for grabs. A goal like that forces you to look at what you've got and how you can use it. That's the moment you learn what you're really capable of.
An imagined competition is pure pressure with no way to win. It pushes you in vague directions: better, faster, bigger. Rather than organizing specific action, those broad goals scatter your efforts. The second founder told me he was racing for a market. He was operating in twenty of them, with a sales team built to develop one. And while a real competitor pushes you to fortify a real weakness, an imagined one leaves you drowning in everything you already worry you lack. You spend your energy on anxiety rather than strategy.
Before you enter any race, ask three questions:
Is the competitor real? Can I name them, watch them, learn from them?
Is there a prize? If I win, what exactly do I get, and what is it worth?
Is there a finish line? A date or a number after which this is over?
Three yeses, and the race deserves everything you've got. Run it like the first founder did: turn it into a project with a number and a date, and let it organize you.
A no means you’re running a race you can’t win.
The most common imagined competition I see right now is the AI race. Almost every founder I talk to is running in it, and almost none of them can name who they’re running against. The competitor is rarely a company. It’s “everyone,” or the people who have already figured it out. There’s no definition of winning, just the fear of falling behind. And there’s no finish line, because a new model comes out every few months. So instead of using the tools in limited, useful ways, founders build more than they need, faster than they can think.
I once asked a CEO where her imagination goes when she pictures someone who could run her company better than her. She described a guy, a second-time founder who had raised more money than she ever had. He would be so confident that the team would follow him anywhere. Even the companies that blew up behind him wouldn’t cost him their love. He was a composite of everything she worried she was not.
I recognized her imaginary rival because I had my own. At Joany, my version was someone easier. I imagined the board replacing me with a yes man who'd nod where I fought. Every founder I've asked has some version of this rival. They’re the inverse of whatever you're afraid you are or aren’t. There’s no beating them either, because every time you grow, they grow too.
Anytime you can’t define the competitor, the prize, or the finish line, that’s who you’re battling. You have to choose not to fight. Pull your head up and look around. What actually needs your attention right now?
Tell me, what does the rival in your head look like?
-Christine
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