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Competition Kills My Creativity
Confession time.
My competition schedule for Jiu-Jitsu has been relatively back to where it was before the Covid-19 pandemic. I’m back to competing in tournaments and grappling super fights all over the country at least once per month, sometimes more. I’ve done this every month this year since February and there’s no end in sight.
Though I’m absolutely thrilled to be back doing the thing that I love, I’ve developed a weird problem that I didn’t even know existed for me until this year: regular competition kills my creativity.
I guess this explains why writers lock themselves in cabins to finish books.
As a writer as well as a competitive martial artist, I need to be both highly competitive and highly creative in order to succeed at my goals. However, after a weekend of intense competition, I recently have found that I’m creatively empty for days (sometimes even a full week) after competing, and I struggle to create anything — much less anything good — during that refractory period.
In this article, I’m going to get into why I believe regular competition is killing my creativity plus what I’m doing in order to reignite my creative flow despite continuous competition.
