Collaboration beats competition

I’ve talked before about how I love to collaborate with our business “rivals”. There’s a place for competition at times, but collaboration almost always has a better outcome.

I saw a recent post on Reddit that talked about that as it relates to driving, and I thought it made a lot of sense. If you treat driving as a collaboration with other drivers, rather than trying to “beat” them, everyone wins. Among their other points, they said:

• Overtaking is not an achievement.
• Someone passing you is not a problem.
• Let other people merge. They aren’t taking “your spot”.

Despite all of the amazing technology to keep us safe in cars, we’re still seeing around 38,000 deaths in the US each year from car accidents. I think the cause of most of those deaths can be put into three main buckets:

1. Not using turn signals (2M accidents/year: source)
2. Distracted driving (1.6M accidents/year: source)
3. Beyond those, some form of “beating other drivers” likely covers most of the rest: speeding, cutting people off, etc.

Unless we were to enact absolutely draconian driving laws, which will never happen, there is no way to instantly solve this. Even so, you can do your part if you want, and I hope that’s a choice you continually make.