All close friendships are marked with competition. Our earliest tests are against our siblings and playmates, and some of that rivalry endures amongst friends into adulthood. Like dogs play fighting, you learn not to bite hard.

Christopher Bollen
About This Quote

This one is a little more obscure, but it's a great concept to play with. First, I'll give you a little background. In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that competition can be an important mechanism in life. I mean that in a good way! When we compete with others, we actually learn how to do things better and become more successful.

To put it simply, when we work together with other people, we learn how to get the job done and become better at what we do. When we compete with others, we learn how to win — and make progress — against other people. When we compete against ourselves, we often stop trying because we don't like who we are when we lose.

But when we compete against others and give our best effort and do our best work, we learn how to be even better than before!

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  1. All close friendships are marked with competition. Our earliest tests are against our siblings and playmates, and some of that rivalry endures amongst friends into adulthood. Like dogs play fighting, you learn not to bite hard.
  2. You know how hard it is to actually touch the world? To make a mark on it? You die and they bury you in it.
  3. He tried to imagine the handsome couple by the refrigerator as two sweaty bodies in a bedroom, one on top of the other. Which did what to the other? Mills kept rotating the two men in his mind, which he never had to do when...
  4. That’s what children eventually were for their aging parents: custodians of technology, free personal IT departments keeping them from disappearing forever from the universal cloud.
  5. Mills was experienced enough to understand what gay men were often forced to be in this world: romantic opportunists.
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