This week has been really intense, but I’ve reached the end feeling satisfied with what I’ve done. There is more to do. More to write. Just – more.

Today is a day for taking a breath and reflecting.

Let’s start with the title, which is what I think I’m thinking about most. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you know I’m a decent speaker. I didn’t have a good sense of how good I was, so in October last year I joined a club to start competing. It turns out that within my club, I’m pretty good:

7 awards, and first place in a contest with the potential to go up to – I think – our regional finals.

The next level of the contest is on Monday, where I’ll be competing against other speakers from the Greater Manchester area: Bolton, Preston, Salford, Didsbury, and the other Manchester central club. After that is a contest for the whole of the north-west of England, and then there’s a fairly enormous jump up to the level of ‘UK and Ireland’.

I feel excited. This is the first time in a long time I’ve felt excited, and I think in part it’s because I know this is something I’m good at and there are no expectations on me to organise, or supervise, or facilitate, or generally expend emotional energy. It is an almost child-like experience, and gently suggests to me that perhaps I’ve been pushing myself a little bit too hard. It feels like – for the first time – I understand my colleagues who go and play five-a-side football, running themselves ragged, chasing after a ball for no real prize other than the joy of winning.

This is play, for me. A willing audience. A subject of my own choosing, with a little bit of challenge. It feels amazing. It feels like flying.

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In work I’m thinking about competition too. I’m thinking about the many, many attempts there have been to implement ‘competition’ inside organisations and the way they fail, they always fail. And then I think about competition when there’s only a few suppliers and how, even if they don’t end up collaborating, they distort the market and make things worse for sellers.

I think about how one of my main selling points as an employee in my organisation is that I know almost everyone. That I’ve always got time for a coffee and money to get it ‘just this time’. I think about how Amazon insisted that its teams operate in self-contained units and how I can’t think of anything that’s less human and more corporate: a demand that we rob each other of favours and reliance and mutual aid.

At work, there are changes on the way. We’re ‘merging’ into another organisation. There’s no way to land it softly, not really: we can only do our best to make it as safe as possible. I think there are, broadly, three outcomes:

1. Crash: the moon-maker. Two bodies of roughly equal size come together at pace. One of them is perturbed but remains essentially the same; the other is fragmented across the other; and from the collision a new body is born and ejected.
2. Collaborate: the eukaryotic cell. One body is absorbed entirely by the other, where it lives quite happily – but also extremely separately. It never considers itself truly part of the host organisation.
3. Consume: nature red in tooth and claw. What is useful is broken down and integrated into the host. What is not is ejected.

My cynicism is showing here, of course. Perhaps there’s a secret fourth option: the perfect partner, the one who fits seamlessly into your friend group and gets on with everyone, and nobody ever falls out, and we all live happily ever after.

If that’s the case, everyone wins. But everyone has to want to win, and to win everyone has to truly believe that there won’t be competition for the scarce resource of time and attention.

That’s a tough sell. Let’s see.