The Universal Nature of Competition
Here's something most people don't think about: the FIFA World Cup is happening right now, Wimbledon just wrapped up, and every country, every player, gets rated. Ranked. Put into a hierarchy. It's everywhere. And that universality isn't an accident — it's baked into how human beings work.
Calls to stop rating and ranking students, to flatten hierarchies in education and child-rearing, overlook a vital universal truth. Comparing, contrasting, judging, competing, rating, and ranking aren't social constructs we can simply switch off. They've been integral to personal and social development since the dawn of human consciousness (Purje, 2026). This competitive aspect of the universal human condition has led to all great achievements — and to a better understanding of both accomplishments and mistakes.
Daniel Coyle put it best in The Talent Code: mistakes are inevitable, and we use them to continue advancing potential (Coyle, 2009). You can't have that feedback loop without some form of comparison. Without ranking, you lose the mechanism that turns failure into growth.
The same principle applies far beyond the playground. In security operations, we build resilience through continuous assessment — not by avoiding judgment, but by making it systematic, fair, and constructive. The children who learn to compete healthily through play become adults who can handle pressure, navigate conflict, and recover from setbacks. Security teams that embrace structured competition — red team vs. blue team exercises, bug bounties, maturity modeling — build the same kind of organizational resilience.
Source: https://www.pspendlens.com/verified/psychology-today-competition-intrinsic
Ang, L., O'Neill, S., Rogers, S., Ko, J. S. Y., & Fox, K. (2025). The Power of Play (PoP) Study. Coyle, D. (2009). The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born, It's Grown. Foley, G. M. (2017). Play as regulation: Promoting self-regulation through play. King, P. (2025). Play-based learning and the play cycle. Lillard, A. S. (2015). The development of play.
It Starts at Birth — The Innate Nature of Comparison
Newborns are already doing it. Before they can walk, talk, or even hold their heads up steadily, infants are comparing, contrasting, and judging at the sensory level.
Research shows that newborns prefer to attend to familiar voices — especially their mother's (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980). They show early sensitivity to facial features (Moon et al., 1993). These aren't learned behaviors. They're biological truths present from birth.
Think about what's actually happening here. An infant's brain is receiving multiple stimuli simultaneously — a voice, a face, a touch, a temperature shift. And it's choosing which ones matter. That's comparison. It's also competition: multiple stimuli vie for the infant's limited attentional resources, and the brain prioritizes one over another. This is universal (Johnson et al., 1991).
Through continuous sensory comparisons, the infant brain undergoes experience-dependent change. This establishes the foundations for perseverance, resilience, and self-directed determined action (Filippa & Kuhn, 2024; Flom et al., 2018).
Here's where this gets interesting for anyone who designs security systems or compliance frameworks: you're building the organizational equivalent. Every alert, every log entry, every access request is a stimulus competing for attention. The question isn't whether comparison will happen — it's whether your systems are designed to handle it constructively, the way a healthy developmental environment handles a child's natural competitive instincts.
Source
DeCasper, A. J., & Fifer, W. P. (1980). Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mothers' voices. Science, 208(4448), 1174–1176. Johnson, M. H., Dziurawiec, S., Ellis, H., & Morton, J. (1991). Newborns' preferential tracking of face-like stimuli and its subsequent decline. Cognition, 40(1–2), 1–19. Moon, C., Cooper, R. P., & Fifer, W. P. (1993). Two-day-olds prefer their native language. Infant Behavior and Development, 16(4), 495–500. Filippa, M., & Kuhn, P. (2024). Early parental vocal contact in neonatal units. Frontiers in Neurology, 15, 1441576. Flom, R., Bahrick, L. E., & Pick, A. D. (2018). Infants discriminate the affective expressions of their peers. Infancy, 23(5), 692–707.
Competition as a Developmental Driver in Childhood
You've seen it. A group of five-year-olds bursts through the school doors and suddenly someone's shouting, "I'm first!" or "I'm the leader!" It's universal. It's developmental. And it serves a purpose.
Competition is intrinsic to children and part of their ongoing development. But here's what most people miss: all aspects of personal and social growth — mistakes, achievements, everything in between — occur during play (Purje, 2026). Play isn't a break from development. It is development.
Through play, children develop:
- Perseverance and resilience
- Self-control and confidence
- Emotional insight and empathy
- Risk assessment capabilities
- Theory of mind — the capacity to understand that other people have their own thoughts, intentions, beliefs, and perspectives (Carlson et al., 2013; Arda Tuncdemir, 2025)
Child-directed play is the primary natural, universal context for developing all of these essential existential, psychological, physical, physiological, and sociological traits (Dewey, 1986; Meltzoff, 2007; Lillard et al., 2013).
Translate this to security operations and the analogy holds surprisingly well. Red team exercises are play. Bug bounties are play. Tabletop incident response drills are play. Through these structured competitive activities, security teams develop resilience, self-control, empathy for the attacker perspective, risk assessment skills, and theory of mind — understanding that adversaries have their own goals, methods, and perspectives.
The teams that treat these exercises as genuine developmental opportunities — not compliance checkboxes — build far stronger organizational defenses. Just like children who are given space to compete freely develop better social and cognitive skills than those whose play is overly structured or suppressed.
Source
Arda Tuncdemir, T. B. (2025). Integrating social-emotional learning through play. Journal of Research in Childhood Education. Carlson, S. M., Koenig, M. A., & Harms, M. B. (2013). Theory of mind. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 4(4), 391–402. Dewey, J. (1986). Experience and education. The Educational Forum, 50(3), 241–252. Meltzoff, A. N. (2007). "Like me": A foundation for social cognition. Developmental Science, 10(1), 126–134. Lillard, A. S., Lerner, M. D., Hopkins, E. J., Dore, R. A., Smith, E. D., & Palmquist, C. M. (2013). The impact of pretend play on children's development: A review of the evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 139(1), 1–34.
The Neuroscience of Play and Executive Function
From a neuroscience perspective, children develop and strengthen their executive functions through choices and actions (Purje, 2026). These choices strengthen neural pathways, integrate sensory input, and enhance motor skills. It's not abstract — it's physical, measurable brain development.
Sensorimotor play and rough-and-tumble interactions stimulate:
- Prefrontal maturation
- Synaptic refinement
- Neural substrates of executive control (Ang et al., 2025; Diamond, 2013; Pellis et al., 2010)
During play, children learn about cooperation. They also learn that not everyone cooperates or is a friend. They learn about conflict, conflict resolution, and unresolved conflicts. They develop communication skills, including understanding what is fair and what is unfair (Olson & Spelke, 2008).
They learn that cooperation may be conditional. That reciprocity may or may not occur. That social interactions may be structured by expectations about who may contribute and who may not. These life lessons support the ongoing development of intellectual, emotional, and psychological maturity.
Self-initiated play strengthens intrinsic motivation, autonomy, and agency when children act freely under self-generated rules (Vygotsky, 1978). This is huge. Self-regulation through self-imposed structure — that's the foundation of both healthy development and effective security governance.
For security & compliance analysts working with 365-day monitoring programs, this neuroscience insight is directly relevant. Continuous monitoring isn't about constant surveillance — it's about creating the conditions for executive function to develop at an organizational level. The right kind of structured competition and assessment builds the neural (or in this case, procedural) pathways that make resilience possible.
Source
Ang, L., O'Neill, S., Rogers, S., Ko, J. S. Y., & Fox, K. (2025). The Power of Play (PoP) Study. ERIC: ED676333. Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168. Pellis, S. M., Pellis, V. C., & Bell, H. C. (2010). The function of play in the development of the social brain. American Journal of Play, 2(3), 278–296.* Olson, K. R., & Spelke, E. S. (2008). Foundations of cooperation in young children. Cognition, 108(1), 222–231. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press.
Moral Development Through Competitive Play
Insightful engagement in play supports the emergence of fairness, reciprocity, rule-following, and shared intentionality — all of which contribute to the construction of the moral self (Kohlberg & Hersh, 1977; Tomasello, 2018; Killen & Smetana, 2015).
This isn't soft stuff. Moral development is foundational. Children who learn fairness through competitive play become adults who can navigate complex ethical landscapes — including the kind of high-stakes decision-making that security professionals face daily.
Physical play creates opportunities to develop perseverance, resilience, social adaptability, and intrinsic flexibility (Brussoni et al., 2012; Kuehn, 2025). It involves recognizing that not all circumstances or problems will be resolved — and that resilience is essential.
Think about incident response. You can't resolve every alert. You can't prevent every breach. What you build through structured competitive practice — through red team exercises, through maturity modeling, through the healthy friction of competing security approaches — is resilience. The ability to keep functioning when things don't go according to plan.
The security & compliance center that treats its teams like children who need protection from all competition will produce professionals who crumble under real pressure. The one that embraces structured, fair competition builds teams that adapt, recover, and ultimately perform better.
Source
Brussoni, M., Olsen, L. L., Pike, I., & Sleet, D. A. (2012). Risky play and children's safety: Balancing protection and resilience. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 9(9), 3134–3148. Killen, M., & Smetana, J. G. (2015). Origins and development of morality. In Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science (pp. 1–49). Kuehn, D. (2025). The resilience factor: Rethinking risk in children's play. BU Journal of Graduate Studies in Education, 17(2), 34–41. Tomasello, M. (2018). The normative turn in early moral development. Human Development, 61(4–5), 248–263. Kohlberg, L., & Hersh, R. H. (1977). Moral development: A review of the theory. Theory Into Practice, 16(2), 53–59.
Why Suppression Cannot Work — The Consciousness Argument
Here's the core insight that makes all of this unavoidable: any attempt to suppress competition cannot prevent the natural processes of comparing, contrasting, competing, rating, ranking, and judging from taking place (Purje, 2026).
Why? Because this process is a function of consciousness — a holistic, universal process (Cheng et al., 2010). You can ban rankings from a classroom. You can remove leaderboards from a dashboard. But you cannot stop the human brain from comparing, contrasting, and judging. It's how consciousness works.
This universal process supports the ongoing, successful development of:
- Critical thinking
- Knowledge acquisition
- Higher-order reasoning
- Deeper understanding
- Analysis of choices, skills, and endurance
In security terms: you can suppress internal competition. You can flatten hierarchies. But your teams will still compare, still judge, still compete — just in ways that are unstructured, unhealthy, and potentially destructive. The question isn't whether competition exists. It's whether you channel it constructively.
A security & compliance analyst who understands this doesn't fight against competitive instincts in their teams. They design systems that harness them — structured red team competitions, healthy maturity modeling, bug bounties that reward genuine skill. They create the equivalent of a playground where competition serves development rather than destroying it.
The organizations that try to suppress competitive dynamics in their security teams end up with the same problem as schools that ban all ranking: the competition doesn't go away. It just goes underground, where it's far more dangerous.
Source
Cheng, J. T., Tracy, J. L., & Henrich, J. (2010). Pride, personality, and the evolutionary foundations of human social status. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(5), 334–347.
Mistakes as Fuel for Growth
Coyle (2009) in The Talent Code argues that mistakes are inevitable and we use them to advance potential. Rating and ranking provide the feedback loop that makes mistake-driven improvement possible.
Without comparison, you can't identify mistakes. Without identification, you can't correct them. Without correction, you don't grow. It's that simple, and it's that powerful.
In security operations, this is the difference between a mature program and an immature one. Mature programs embrace structured competition — they run red team exercises, they publish internal maturity scores, they reward the teams that find the most vulnerabilities. They understand that mistakes, when surfaced through healthy competition, become fuel for growth.
Immature programs suppress competition. They punish failure. They create cultures where mistakes are hidden rather than learned from. The result? Teams that can't handle real incidents because they've never practiced competing under pressure.
The security & compliance center that treats its 365-day monitoring as a developmental opportunity — where every alert is a chance to learn, every incident is a competition to be analyzed and improved upon — builds organizations that are genuinely resilient. Not just compliant on paper, but actually capable of withstanding real attacks.
That's the universal truth that calls to stop rating and ranking keep overlooking. Competition isn't the problem. Unstructured, unhealthy competition is. The solution isn't suppression — it's design.
Source
Coyle, D. (2009). The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born, It's Grown. Arrow Books, Random House.