The 2019 season of Formula 1 started the weekend of March 15-17 in Melbourne Australia. Every weekend that there is a F1 race, there’s a practice on Friday, qualifying on Saturday, and the race itself on Sunday. Race weekends occur every other weekend (on average), and entire race teams are uprooted and travel to a different country where F1 race tracks are located worldwide. Succeeding as a F1 team requires copious amounts of energy, money, teamwork, practice, research, experiments, adaptability and flexibility.

Why am I talking about F1 in an article that’s titled What Our Perceived Adversaries Can Teach Us? Partly because I never in my life thought I would find F1 interesting, but Netflix came out with a docuseries a week before the 2019 F1 season started called Formula One: Drive to Survive, which I watched all of and found very interesting; but mostly because while I was watching that docuseries, I realized how much of their successes was due to competition, learning from other teams, and being able to have teammates and other teams be a yardstick for our own potential success.

Before I dive in, I am in no way condoning a lifestyle of being obsessed with ambition and living in a constant state of fear of not being perfect or the best just for the sake of ego stroking. What I am expressing is my opinion that our perceived adversaries can instead be used as inspiration for us to become a better version of ourselves, and see how much we can accomplish because we know what is possible when others perform well and succeed. F1 racing leans more into the realm of ambition, competition, clashing egos, the rich and famous; we can take some lessons from it and turn it into something good to learn from.

The largest example of this is the organization within a F1 race team. Each team consists of two main drivers, and a huge team of people to make the engineering, management, science, two second pit stops, and so much more, work well. The rest of the team can range from about 100 people to around 400-500 people for the teams with the largest budget, such as Mercedes and Ferrari. The two race drivers need to work together to make it to the podium (which are reserved for first, second and third final positions), but they are each other’s biggest enemies because they are also competing to be the best driver in the team and in F1. If one vastly outperforms the other, it doesn’t look good because they are driving the exact same race car. This leads to the worse driver not being welcomed back to the team and being replaced, and the better driver receiving all of the resources from the team to win, or being offered a seat on a higher paying, more successful race team. However, without the other driver in their team, the team management and the drivers themselves would have less of an idea of both car performance and driver performance. How would they know how to improve things? Therein lies how we can use this as an opportunity to learn and grow, become better at our craft, stretch our abilities, and become inspired.

“If you have passed through life without an opponent– no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.” – Seneca

The example of F1 racing is an extreme one, but the concept of being inspired by a teammates performance and success can be extended to other types of relationships we have in our lives. This can be coworkers, peers in the same industry who work in different companies, even loved ones such as friends and family.

Being inspired by others to develop our skills and knowledge is different from being in pure, ambitious competition with our perceived adversaries because inspiration comes from a place of excitement, creativity and joy. It comes from a place of love and flow.

Ambitious, ego-driven competition comes from a place of fear, where information silos, mind games, and not helping others for so-called security comes into play. This will only attract more fear, less abundance and less success in life because, it seems to me, a lot of success depends on other people wanting to work with us.

If we are joyful and excited, we are likely to foster an environment and personality that attracts people to trust us and want to help us succeed.

Who in our lives can inspire us to learn more, do more, improve, and be able to contribute positively to our lives and the lives of others? I think it’s worth contemplating.

Image source: Jake Archibald