Quotes About Competition

Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them. The electric battery, the telegraph, the steam engine, and the digital music library were all independently invented by multiple individuals in the space of a few years.

Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn't the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace. So

If ideas were fully liberated, then entrepreneurs wouldn't be able to profit from their innovations, because their competitors would immediately adopt them. And so where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient markets: environments that protect copyrights and patents and trade secrets and a thousand other barricades we've erected to keep promising ideas out of the minds of others.

A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn't ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative.

What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted.

Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn't the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace.

They are deliberately cultivating these states to solve critical challenges and outperform their competition. It isn't just grit, or better habits, or longer hours that are separating the best from the rest. To hear these trail-blazers tell it, the insights they receive in those states are what make all the difference.

Jerry Seinfeld once remarked that today's athletes churn through the rosters of sports teams so rapidly that a fan can no longer support a group of players. He is reduced to rooting for their team logo and uniforms: "You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city.

a free market puts a premium on empathy.

Reality is a powerful selection pressure. A hominid that soothed itself by believing that a lion was a turtle or that eating sand would nourish its body would be outreproduced by its reality-based rivals.

As the economist Ludwig von Mises put it centuries later, "If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread.")

If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread

To claim that [natural selection at the level of competing groups] is morally superior to natural selection at the level of competing individuals would imply, in its human application, that systematic genodice is morally superior to random murder.

As Winston Churchill noted, "Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.

Outwitting and second-guessing an organism of approximately equal mental abilities with non-overlapping interests, at best, and malevolent intentions, at worst, makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition. And a cognitive arms race clearly could propel a linguistic one.

Players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal's claws....

Natural selection consists of competition among genes to be represented in the next generation, and the organisms we see today are descendants of those that edged out their rivals in contests for mates, food, and dominance.

As Thomas Hobbes noted in 1651, "Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead.

Ludwig von Mises put it centuries later, "If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread.")

These fields include genetics, which explains the replicators that make natural selection possible, and game theory, which illuminates the fates of goal-seeking agents in a world that contains other goal-seeking agents.2

He who is in love with himself has no rivals.

I'm competitive - that's what defines me - and I love it.

I am a sprinter, and I love to go fast. It's very difficult for me to be patient and follow a race strategy or conserve energy.

All is fair in love and songwriting.