We all have downsides. And as humans, we share some of them across our species.
Take our tendency to understand things in relative terms. Being the richest person in a middle-class neighborhood generally makes you happier than being the poorest person in an ultra-rich one.
Or that we are naturally wired to compare, to compete, to sort ourselves into tribes where we feel a sense of superiority. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution built that programming in.
The trick isn’t to run from these. The flip side of our worst is often our best — it’s just a question of channeling.
Take competitiveness. It can lead to all kinds of dark patterns. But channel it inward — toward being better today than yesterday, significantly better than a month ago — and it becomes a powerful engine. Channel it in ways that lift the people around you, that produce outcomes making some small improvement to the world, and it becomes something genuinely worthwhile.
The goal isn’t to attempt to eliminate our dark sides. It is to point the core driver of the dark side into some place useful.
A Learning a Day 