Children in particular are super good at inventing competitions, but Thomas also remembers a brilliant competition system.
There’s nothing you can’t make a competition out of. I’m sure there are “loading the dishwasher”, “fixing a bicycle tire” or “getting the duvet-in-the-cover” competitions somewhere. I don’t even have to google if those matches really exist, they do, I know and so do you. Our urge to be better than someone else is so moronic, we don’t even care what it is. Pole sitting, underwater billiards, speed reading: you can always start a competition, create divisions, divide into weight classes. By the way, for the beginners: immediately pull the cover over your head, put your hands in the corners, grab the ends of the duvet and turn the whole rat inside out in one go. Yes, I’m pretty good at it. In my weight class that is.
Even people who ‘don’t like sports’, who think it’s a bad thing, all that competitiveness, who don’t participate in it – those people compete against people who participate even less. You can withdraw from the hectic city life and live in a village, but then you’re still a wimp compared to the family that built their own log cabin in Patagonia.
During a competition you try harder than usual, and you can take advantage of that. All I have to do is think I’m competing in the World Column Tapping Championships, and suddenly the words flow more smoothly and my fingers tap furiously and with fewer misspellings. Seriously, I’m imagining it now and it works. I will never qualify for the World Cup Deadlines, but a person must know his limits. I’m not tall enough for professional basketball, that’s no shame.
I used to do fantasy games all the time. Hold your breath in the bath for as long as possible, cycle without hands for as long as possible, jump from the highest possible steps – all in a well-filled stadium, of course. And when I ran up the stairs at home, I imagined that the scouts of the national selection ‘traphollen’ watched how fast I was – which was really crazy fast. Sometimes I let my mother count: twenty-one, two-two… and then I was already upstairs. One and a half seconds per step, huh? Not surprising, for the second smallest in the class.
In any case, children are super good at coming up with competitions. In primary school we had ‘wall fighting’. That wall was around the sandpit and we practiced a combination of judo and sumo on it, where the aim was to push your opponent off the wall and to stand on it yourself. The winner was then ‘king’ and could then receive the next challenger. The loser had to go back to the very back of the line of challengers, plotting revenge and winning strategies, until it was his turn to meet the king again and take his crown. It was a brilliant competition system that should be introduced everywhere. Ajax remains champion until it loses to Heracles once (which happens every now and then), and then it has to start again at the bottom of the Eredivisie, until it is Ajax’s turn to try again against Heracles – only now NEC is there, because everyone wins sometimes, even NEC.