Your Collaborators Are Not Your Competitors.
Aug 30, 2020
Hello dear reader,
This post is not founded in scientific literature. This post comes from troubling experiences with certain people who shall remain nameless and many discussions with people whom I trust who have experienced similar things.
This post is about one thing: Competition.
Competition is good for a lot of things, like stimulating innovation and creativity in a marketpalce, but it is incapable of enhancing professional partnerships and collaboration.
Competition is for competitors.
Competition is “the opposition.”
Collaborators ARE NOT competitors. If you constantly feel that your collaborator is trying to get a one-up on you, then you need to stop working with that person. Mentors and mentees cannot be competitors. Your mentor is your personal and professional development collaborator and if you percieve these people as always trying to outperform you in some way, and they may be, then they are not mentoring you in the way that you need and they are hurting you. If this is your PI, leave. If this is a another faculty or post-doc, report them or avoid them, remove yourself or them from projects, etc.
The nature of interpersonal relationships is dynamic; collaborators and competitors can switch places just like athletes can be traded to competing teams. So, it is important to understand that competitors are not explicitly saboteurs. Some people are competitors just because they happen to be working on a similar thing at a similar time and neither team wants to “get scooped.” However, it is important to realize that ideas do not exist in a vaccuum and it is totally reasonable that two groups in science could report similar discoveries and similar times. Similarliy, these situations could benefit from healthy convesation which could turn the competition into a collaboration that benefits both teams.
Last, academia is hard–like really hard–and seems to foster all kind of negative behaviors and mental health issues, which sucks. So, I highly recommend finding someone who you can talk to honestly and openly as those conversations might help you to come to terms with how specific people fit into your professional life.
Best, Mitchell