I Hate Competitions, Yet I Joined the Medium Writers Challenge

There is something to gain

Competitions are trash

I am not a fan of competitions. I see all forms of competition as gambling. Taking part in any competition is as good as buying a lottery ticket and expecting to win. The good news is that you might actually win, but you are more likely not to win. So, you should take that ticket money and get yourself some junk and eat or better still save it for no reason.

No matter your skillset, the chances of winning a competition with many participants is as slim as a broomstick. Furthermore, metrics used to judge the outcome of competition are usually subjective and, hence, biased, especially when the event is not in an objective domain like sciences and maths.

A myriad of factors nudges the judges into making the decisions they take when deciding who wins a competition. Some of these factors they know and have written down, so they are on track. They are not aware of other nudges. But, again, I do not mean competitions like athletics or math and science that are objective and based on verifiable data. On the contrary, I mean competitions in the arts, such as writing, painting, drawing, and more.

It is easy to tell who is a faster runner after a 100-meter race by watching who crosses the finish line first — assuming all the runners started simultaneously (all things being equal). But how do you tell who is the better songwriter between Bob Dylan and John Lennon? I am sure if you listen to these two or one of them, you might have a choice. You would probably choose the songwriter whose songs you can relate to the more or whose music has a better melody. Or perhaps whose songs remind you of your first love. And all these are subjective markers.

For example, before adopting blind auditioning in selecting orchestra musicians, there were only 6% female orchestra performers. This is because, unbeknownst to the hiring teams, there were biased in their selection processes. If a woman is called to perform a piece, she would be rated lower than a man who comes to perform the same piece, even though she may have done better. While the judges thought they based their judgment on the performance and musical ability of the auditionees, they didn’t know the other subtle biases that were playing in the background.

However, from 1970, when blind auditioning was adopted, there was a significant rise in female orchestra musicians hired. In the 1990s, the number of female orchestras had risen to over 30% from what it was in 1970. The judges would have sworn that they were objective. I am sure they all understood music and could tell a good player from a poor one. So how come when they started the blind auditioning, they began to hire more female performers?

We can tell the same story about the job hiring process in the USA. Many researchers have found that it takes more than eight times more qualification and experience for a black-sounding name than a white-sounding name to get a callback. I am also sure these recruiters wanted the best candidate for their organizations. They would swear they did not put the sound of prospective employee names into consideration when picking the candidates they wanted to call back.

The point is, many factors determine how we make selections in any competition, and they are usually subjective and biased.

Why I think Vocal Media is trash

For the reasons I have explained above, I have always stayed away from competitions (At least the direct ones). Although most things in life are competitions in some sense, I am sure you understand what I mean by direct competition — Where someone has to take the first position and the other second and so on.

Vocal is one platform that is fueled by its ubiquitous competition. Apparently, that is Vocal’s selling point, and people are gravitating towards it for the competitions. Vocal even has to put some competitions exclusively for the writers on the Vocal + subscribers. I have never entered any of them, even though I receive their prompts each time in my mail.

What makes vocal competitions not worth your time is that you have little else to gain if you don’t win — Similar to gambling and buying a lottery ticket. And again, remember that the odds are against you each time you enter a competition or lottery game. With Vocal, you can hardly get some good reads on your published story. People earn pennies or nothing at all from reads. So you can only make a living off Vocal if you, by magic, win a competition now and then.

Why I joined the Medium Writers challenge

Unlike Vocal, I get great reads from my followers and others when Medium promotes my articles. I don’t have to wait and wish that my story outperforms anyone’s story for me to be happy that I put in an effort. Nothing beats getting some reads and some monetary compensation for the work you put into writing.

So the medium writer’s challenge is not a competition to me. Instead, I see it as a prompt to help me write something amazing for my followers to read and enjoy. I am not trying to outperform any of the other writers while crafting any stories for the challenge. I am not trying to win anything. And I can still make money off it with the regular reads I would get. That looks like a win already.