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Does Creativity Kill Your Competitive Edge?

How to make your cake and eat it too.

Chris Wojcik
5 min readSep 12, 2021
Photo via Rolling and the Punches

The only thing that went well last weekend in my Jiu-Jitsu tournament in Florida was that my blue and blonde hair looked absolutely stunning.

Other than that, my performance at the IBJJF Pans was completely and utterly shitty. I can’t help but be filled with disappointment both in myself and the way that things played out on the mat. I made a mistake early on in the match, got swept, and lost 2–0.

The worst part isn’t that I lost or the way that I lost, the worst part of my early tournament loss has been the constant pounding of doubts in my head for the past week.

Was I unfocused? Am I doing too much work outside of training? Have I been slacking on my training? What’s going to happen next? What will I do?

These doubts are never-ending.

I used to worry that competition was killing my creativity, but now I’m worrying the opposite: Am I trying to be too creative?

More specifically, is my creative self killing my competitive self?

Competition is not the most creative place

I got an angry comment from someone who’d been reading my articles for months now over an article I wrote…

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Chris Wojcik
Chris Wojcik

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