1 VOL. 27 No 36. October 2013
THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE MAGAZINE LE MAGAZINE DES LANGUES ÉTRANGÈRES THE ART OF COMPETING. By Nilse González Jaramillo Engeneering student
The dictionary tells us that a competition is a contest for some prize, honor, or advantage, a struggle for victory or superiority. For me, competing goes further than simply looking to be better than others, it implies seeking to be better than yourself. During a competition you can compare your skills to others’, improve them or even discover them! Let me tell you my own story. I never pictured myself as a public speaker, but it was in my first high school semester at a PREPA-R-ARTE contest that I realized I wasn’t really bad at it. And even though I didn’t enter the contest willingly (because it was obligatory) it turned out to be a good experience that I repeated the following year (this time because I wanted to). I didn’t win a prize (well, maybe a third or second place) but I won something better, the understanding of one single (but very important) thing: It doesn’t matter if you win or you lose, sometimes you win more as a loser than as a winner, I mean look at me, I discovered a talent I didn’t know I had. I would like to say that my mother always told me “winning isn’t everything” (that would give a touching mood to my words) , but I can’t because she never did, that was something I learned by myself. Don’t repudiate a defeat, embrace it!, and take the best of it, sometimes a defeat is a step for something greater, a warm-up stage if you will. There’s a song I love that says “you got to lose to know how to win” how true it is! Someone who has always been a winner won’t accept defeat easily, but someone who has lost will surely know how to be a winner. And… how to be a good winner? Well, I’m not perfect to tell you how to deal with a victory, I, myself, find it hard to do, I’d just like to tell you two things: first of all, don’t feel more than the others just because you won, “au contraire” be humble enough to recognize the effort of those who didn’t and second of all, don’t take victory as a guarantee that you are the best, but as a motivation to improve your skills even more. One more thing, if you have the opportunity to compete at something, do it! You’ll never regret it, trust me, I