Your Opponent Is Your Greatest Coach
The book “The Art of Learning”, by American author Josh Waitzkin, is one of my favorite books of all time.
It describes Josh's journey as a kid to become a champion in the competitive world of junior chess, then, later on in life, a champion in Tai Chi push hands.
The particular section that stuck with me the most has to do with the role of the opponent in his own career. In his own words:
“From one perspective the opponent is the enemy. On the other hand there is no one who knows you more intimately, no one who challenges you so profoundly or pushes you to excellence and growth so relentlessly.”
In competitive pursuits, such as chess, every competitor wants to be the sole winner.
Athletes exert themselves to achieve the highest level of performance precisely because there's someone else just as good competing with them striving to get the same thing.
When you are performing at your best and you still lose, your opponent has found and provided some very valuable piece of information: what is the weakness in your own play, where there are still gaps in your understanding and, ultimately, where you can still improve.
In the same vein, the economist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman emphasized the role of “adversarial collaboration” in academic research. One of his favorite practice was to collaborate with his adversaries and poke holes at each other's academic research.
This adversarial practice ends up being very fruitful for both parties -- if one's own ego can survive the blows -- as it would help expose the weakest parts of each other's research and, in an intellectually honest manner, seek competing explanation to the same set of observations.
I think in consumer western media we tend to overemphasize the roles of the individual as the single lone genius who is imbued with greatness in their own right.
In reality, this is not quite the case.
People that excel are as much a product of their own effort and talent as they are a product of their environment and of the peers that shared the same pursuit at the same time.