That doesn't seem to me like a mentality of competition. It seems to me like a mentality of just going with the status quo. Competition in no way requires going with the status quo. If you can out-compete others by changing the rules, competition tells you to change the rules. David was competing with Goliath; David won the competition by changing the rules.
To the extent competition is harmful, it's harmful because, as noted at the start of the article, it tends to foster a zero-sum mentality: the only way I can win is for you to lose. But creating wealth, which is what "competition" is ultimately supposed to be about in the economic sense, requires positive sum exchanges. Positive sum means everybody wins. That's what I was expecting the rest of the article to be about; but it isn't. It's just about a different kind of zero sum, where you make the competitors lose by changing the rules instead of by playing better than them within the existing rules.
It seems, however, that the author acquired another related misconception along the way:
>To do anything meaningful, we need to ultimately step out of the shadows of others and into our own.
Some of the greatest accomplishments of humanity have come from people simply working as a group. Sometimes those successes are utterly contingent on a lot of people deliberately not "stepping out of the shadows of others", but instead simply quietly and efficiently getting on with what needs to be done.
Therefore AC power is undoublty a Westinghouse/Tesla/ many others accomplishment yet without the relentless pushing and originality of one person (Tesla) to step out of the giant Edison AC would not have come a reality at its time.
So I think we see two things here: Ingenuity and true novel approaches are (according to my observation) very often the think of one passionate person, the societal breakthrough requires hands and ties working together.
As the second requires the first yet we as a society overemphasize on teamwork already in step one, we are actively hampering innovation. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24374363
What?!? Local retail is being absolutely decimated right now. If anything, big box stores have had a resurgence as being “essential” with a wide product catalog gave them a temporary advantage. Most mom & pop retail are being crushed (obviously there are some exceptions).
Wariness of crowds is also not going away. A local retailer is likely to draw a smaller crowd at a given point in time than big box counterpart.
1. You are uniquely positioned to execute
2. That’s very difficult, ideally possible for a competitor to respond to
3. And solves a painful, but overlooked problem
And then your bigger competitor steals your solution and runs with it.
That's the price of weak patents. Now you need a lot more money to promote and scale fast.
