Is competition good? Yes and No both!

To start with, I'm Jaclyn and I'm still in my last year of high school.
English is not my mother tongue, and this is an essay I write for fun.
But it would be much appreciated it if someone will help me check this and tell me what I need to improve on.

Is competition good? The answer can be both yes or no, depending on what kind of competition you're inquiring about. There are various types of competition, and one that's the most obvious is competition among a group of people in which they take a test, and determine who is the best out of them based on the test results. This is initially a good way to get people to work and try harder to contend for the best place, but later, people grow weary of it. A lot find it hard to contend and the shame of not getting what they aim for, even after giving it their all is just impossible to cope with. This is where the thought of competition as a form of torment that they bring upon themselves stem from, hence the avoidance of competition as much as possible. This is also where the method which is best known as "cheating" comes from. Despite the risks they have to undertake in order to win, they convince themselves that if the prize is victory, it's worth taking the risk for. That it's the price they have to pay. People shrug off the fact that cheating is morally wrong, and start deeming cheating as acceptable, for that's what is planted in their mind since a very young age, and this is passed from age to age, and from generation to generation until there's no more fair play. And I can attest to it that people today suffer greatly for it. We think highly of ourselves, no longer find the thought of losing tolerable, we're afraid to venture into a competition because society is judgmental and people think of losing as a disgrace. Competition, as an effect, loses its true essence and meaning.

There's also a competition that we build among ourselves, which is not necessary and is really ludicrous, but is unfortunately something that we can't help. The competition of who's the most beautiful between two people, who is slimmer, who is richer, who has the most handsome boyfriend, the list goes on and on. Needless to say, we can't help comparing ourselves to other people, and the thought that people might be better than us, kills us ever so slowly. This is human nature. I won't go out and deny that this never happened to me before. People strive to be better so they can get rid of the thought, but it grows more and more, like a parasites that rests on our mind, persistent on staying and don't want to be gotten rid of. As a result, our attitude towards people that we compare ourselves to, change. We become hostile and spiteful. We start thinking of competition as something negative. Because people are afraid of losing.

In reality, competition is supposed to be a positive thing. It's supposed to be an opportunity for us to know how well we do and what place and what level we're in amongst all the contenders. Whether or not we gain victory shouldn't be a matter. If we don't get what we aim for, we can take it as an experience and try harder. Cheating shouldn't be a way out that should even cross our mind. People shouldn't be afraid of losing. I've joined several competitions at school, which I have never once won. But I persevere because I believe with each step I take I'm getting closer to victory.

To sum it up, competition can be either good or bad depending on how we choose to view it. If we think of competition as an opportunity to measure our depth of knowledge on a subject, revel in victory if we gain it and able to accept our failure as a message to try harder next time, then we will only benefit from the competition. But if we refuse to keep an open mind about it, refusing to take a step further for fear of losing, then the choice is ours.

The answer can be both yes and no. ...."and" means more than "or" ... the answer is both of them and not one of them.


This is initially act as a very efficient motivator and people try harder and harder to secure the first place for them. However, later on they become weary of such severe competition.


It can lead to many negative emotional and psychological conditions that may vary from stress to severe depression.


This sentence does not deliver a clear idea to the reader. Better rephrase it .

Hope this article would help you polish this essay further;

Competition is a contest between people or groups of people for control over resources. In this definition, resources can have both literal and symbolic meaning. People can compete over tangible resources like land, food, and mates, but also over intangible resources, such as social capital. Competition is the opposite of cooperation and arises whenever two parties strive for a goal that cannot be shared.

Competition can have both beneficial and detrimental effects. Positively, competition may serve as a form of recreation or a challenge provided that it is non-hostile. On the negative side, competition can cause injury and loss to the organisms involved, and drain valuable resources and energy. Many evolutionary biologists view inter-species and intra-species competition as the driving force of adaptation, and, ultimately, of evolution. However, some biologists, most famously Richard Dawkins, prefer to think of evolution in terms of competition between single genes, which have the welfare of the organism "in mind" only insofar as that welfare furthers their own selfish drives for replication. Some Social Darwinists claim that competition also serves as a mechanism for determining the best-suited group-politically, economically, and ecologically.

Many philosophers and psychologists have identified a trait in most living organisms that can drive the particular organism to compete. This trait, unsurprisingly called "competitiveness," is viewed as an innate biological trait that coexists along with the urge for survival. Competitiveness, or the inclination to compete, has become synonymous with aggressiveness and ambition in the English language. Just as advanced civilizations integrate aggressiveness and competitiveness into their interactions, as a way to distribute resources and adapt, most plants compete for higher spots on trees to receive more sunlight. However, Stephen Jay Gould and others have argued that as one ascends the evolutionary hierarchy, competitiveness (the survival instinct) becomes less innate and more a learned behavior.

The term also applies to econometrics. Here, it is a comparative measure of the ability and performance of a firm or sub-sector to sell and produce/supply goods and/or services in a given market. The two academic bodies of thought on the assessment of competitiveness are the Structure Conduct Performance Paradigm and the more contemporary New Empirical Industrial Organisation model. Predicting changes in the competitiveness of business sectors is becoming an integral and explicit step in public policymaking. Within capitalist economic systems, the drive of enterprises is to maintain and improve their own competitiveness.