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Why Cooperation Beats Competition If You Design It Right

We praise competition because it slings us awake, but the quiet truth is that cooperation does the heavy lifting. It stitches days together, forges talent into reliability, and turns cleverness into outcomes you can touch. You see it most clearly where failure costs blood or bread. Think of the night shift in a busy hospital: rounds, handoffs, an attending who catches what a resident almost missed because the culture expects second looks instead of blaming first movers. The system works not by goodwill alone but by rules that force repetition and reputational memory: chart audits, morbidity and mortality conferences, and the knowledge that you will see the same colleagues tomorrow. That is how fragile human kindness hardens into durable care.

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Incredible Beauty of the Bicycle Card Aesthetic

I was never a great skill card player growing up. I was quite excellent at War, and at 52 Pick-Up, but other than that, my mastery in card games was more in my mind than in my hand. I never played a dime or a nickel flush where I won any type of pot, but I always enjoyed holding the actual playing cards. The designs were a fascination to my young mind, and today, when I happened upon the Bicycle cards website, I was taken back to a time when a deck of cards lasted for years of regular use around the kitchen table with nickel raises and dime bets; but these cards, these new Bicycle cards, had a right life of their own. The opaque card box was gone; replaced by a lovely translucent plastic that was more welcoming to both hand, and eye.

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Performing Arts and Broadcast Entertainment Professors Should Not Compete with their Students

One of the first things my friend, and mentor — and Columbia University in the City of New York professor — Howard Stein told me, was that he was once a produced, and award-winning Playwright, and when he decided to teach other Playwrights at the University of Iowa for a living, he gave up his Playwright life because he didn’t want to compete with his students. I thought that instinct was honorable and right and the lesson sticks with me today. New plays have a hard enough time getting produced on their own, and when you’re in direct competition with your professor for stage time, and production dollars, you quickly discern how easy it is for the amateur Playwright to fail in the same professional arena as the Professor.

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