Competitive-ness... a Gift?

*Disclaimer: This is random. (But then, aren't all my blogs random?)

I took a StrengthsQuest quiz a couple years ago that was supposed to tell me what my special gifts were and how they could be best used. I know the results told me my top 5 gifts, but at the moment, I can only remember one of them – competitive-ness. When the word popped up on the screen after I answered all the questions, I was really skeptical… “Wait, what? Competitive-ness? Isn’t that like, I don’t know, some sort of weakness I need to work on and not a strength? And well yeah, I like winning but… is it really so strong that it’s one of the top five characteristics about me? ...”

I asked my dad what he thought about the results; he wasn’t so sure about competitive-ness either. But then I asked three of my best friends... They ALL agreed with the results 100%. “Yes Lizzie. You are VERY competitive… think about it.” Which then, of course, led to discussions about how I’m constantly comparing myself to others (in grades, in sports, in how far I am in reading a particular book, etc.). We talked about how many different sorts of contests I enter and inevitably win (not because I’m just amazing at lots of things, but because I’m so competitive that I will end up doing EVERYTHING I can to win).

Ok, ok… so I’m competitive; I concede. But that’s NOT a gift! The way I see it, if I’m really as competitive as this quiz-thing makes me out to be, then it seems like I am only thinking about how I can beat other people, not how I can serve them or show them God’s love. I felt like the gifts-quiz was all wrong... it didn't reveal gifts, it revealed faults!

But as I’ve thought about this apparent discrepancy in my quiz results over the past couple years, I think I’ve discovered a thing or two about competition:

Although this may be a weakness I need to work on, the results were right; competition IS a strength too.

Being competitive gives me motivation to get a job done and to do it well. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been tempted to just give up on something, but was motivated by others (whether I knew them or not) who stayed in the race/class/test/writing-process/campaign/… and through their personal endurance evoked my own.

Where am I going with this? Well… I need motivation; YOU can help. I’ve been realizing that I haven’t been writing a lot of blogs lately. Yes, most of that is due to the fact that I’m busy. But let’s be real – I’m always busy. I could find time to blog if I really wanted to. But when I see that none of my other friends are blogging (and if they do, it is only sporadically), I have zero motivation to write my own. Plus, I begin to feel that since nobody is writing blogs, nobody is reading them either… so why write my own if no one cares to read it? All that to say, since I’m competitive, the more YOU blog, the more I’ll feel like I should blog and the more blogs you’ll have to read to help waste your time in a productive fashion. (Also, this gives me a good excuse to procrastinate on other homework I’d rather not do… which happens to be why I am writing this blog in the first place.)

I better stop procrastinating now; it looks like my roommate might have caught up to me homework-wise...