Book cover via Amazon

The zen habits webiste has an interesting post about success not being a competition. The article starts by suggesting that helping others can also help you in the long run. That is a sentiment and a belief that I can wholeheartedly agree with.

What strikes me as interesting about this is that this is exactly the same tennet that is explored by Robert Holden in his book Success Intelligence.

Robert, perhaps exploiting the then vogue for ‘intelligences’ viz ‘emotional intelligence’, coined the phrase success intelligence and expounded upon it in his book. He wrote about people’s attitudes to success and how certain beliefs held people back from achieving success, and also about how helping others to achieve success could bring about greater success for all. The various attitudes to success is a topic I wrote an article about for my own website.

Of course, helping others to succeed also makes you feel good, the zen habits blog makes mention of this. It has also been suggested that this is one reason why some people go into ‘caring’ or ‘nuturing’ professions such as teaching, nursing or counseling. However, sharing success seems ‘okay’ when the success you enable others to obtain is different from your own success but what if you both seek success in the same field? Is joint success then as beneficial or is that when it turns into a competition?

It often seems that competition for success emerges when two or more people seek success in the same field. It is difficult at such times for the people involved to envisage ways of working together to create greater success. This is where the narrow focussed mind needs to be replaced by some creative and imaginative collaboration between the parties involved.

So have a look at the zen habits post about success; there is a lot more there than I have talked about here.