Competition

Women’s tennis star Madison Keys had been around the sport for a decade and a half, a much-admired player with sizable talent, but…never…quite…breaking through on one of tennis’s signature stages. Until she finally won the Australian Open in March of 2025.

Before Australia, Keys reached only one major final, the U.S. Open in 2017. That had been a cruelly brief day, as she fell 6-3, 6-0. As she reached her late 20s, the notion of not living up to expectations gnawed at her.

“It started becoming this internal build up…is it ever going to happen?” Keys recalled. “It was getting to the point where I was fairly unhappy with myself, and not just on a tennis court. It was starting to bleed into my life.”
“I was supposed to be great, but I’m not,” Keys remembered thinking.
Finally, she confronted the isolating pressures of her sport. Self-worth had become tied to results, or the lack thereof.

“It was one of those things where you say it out loud, pause, and you’re like, “Wow, that’s a lot to carry around,” she said.

Keys made a critical choice: She would stop defining herself by wins and losses. She was an elite athlete with plenty to be thankful for. The realization was liberating. “You can finally get to the point of letting some things go,” she said.

A Snapchat feature lets paying users see their position in their friends’ digital orbits. For some teens, whose friends are everything, it’s adding to their anxiety.

Snapchat+ subscribers can check where they rank with a particular friend based on how often that friend communicates with them. The result is automatically rendered in a solar-system metaphor: Are you Mercury, the planet closest to your friend? Great! Uranus? Bad sign.

“A lot of kids my age have trouble differentiating best friends on Snapchat from actual best friends in real life,” says 15-year-old Callie Schietinger. She said she had her own problems when a boyfriend noticed that he was Neptune in her solar system. He asked who held the Mercury position and when she told him it was a guy friend, he got mad.

More than 20 million U.S. teens use the app, though most don’t pay for Snapchat+. Young adults with those paid accounts have seen friendships splinter and young love wither due to the knowledge that someone else ranks higher on the app. Now, lawmakers, doctors, and parents are giving fuller attention to these apps and how they broadly affect kids’ mental health.

Callie and her boyfriend have since broken up, for other reasons. But that stress and the misunderstandings she has seen other friends experience have soured her on the feature. “It’s everyone’s biggest fear put onto an app,” Callie says. “Ranking is never good for anyone’s head.”

The Paralympic Games is a celebration of athletic achievement for those with physical disabilities. It has been marred by a growing concern: “classification doping,” (which borrows language used to describe performance enhancing substance abuse). Athletes are misrepresenting the extent of their disabilities to gain an unfair advantage over competitors.

Double amputee Oksana Masters, a prominent Paralympic athlete, believes officials are more interested in maintaining a positive image than addressing the issue. "They want to keep the warm and fuzzy narrative going," she said. "If they knew what's really going on behind closed doors, they'd be shocked."

The Paralympic classification system is designed to place athletes into competitions with others who have similar impairments. While some disabilities are easy to categorize, others are more ambiguous, relying on the judgment of medical classifiers and the integrity of the athletes themselves.

The most infamous Paralympic cheating scandal came at the 2000 Sydney Games, where Spain’s intellectual disability men’s basketball team won the gold medal despite fielding a roster with 10 players who did not have disabilities.

Physician Kevin Kopera, a volunteer in the Paralympic classification system, is cautious about dismissing the issue. "I don't believe anyone can say to what degree misrepresentation exists in parasports," he said. "Any statement in this regard would be speculative. Certainly, to say it doesn't exist would not be realistic. The stakes are too high."

Maybe money does buy happiness, after all—especially if you can afford more of it than your pals.

That’s according to the findings of a recent working paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The paper used a survey of Dutch households to determine whether believing you’re in better financial standing than your peers can impact your beliefs and behavior.

The most striking finding? Believing you earn more than your peers—whom researchers defined as people of similar age, education, and marital and homeownership status—actually makes you happier.

That impact was evident regardless of actual income, researchers said. In other words, it didn’t matter how much money respondents actually made, only how it compared with others’ earnings. One of the lead authors of the study said, “When you realize your [relative] position is good, then you’re more happy, It’s not about the absolute number.”

Does a pay raise bring happiness? Sometimes it will, but the level of happiness is often tied to how we compare our salaries to others.

According to a story in The Wall Street Journal, people’s happiness with their pay is strongly tied to how it compares with the pay of others around them, say researchers who study compensation. Sometimes, those comparisons rankle.

Executives are more likely to leave their companies if their pay is low compared with other top bosses, according to a 2017 study in the journal Human Resource Management. Comparisons matter closer to home, too. Living in an area where people tend to make more money than you is linked to being less happy.

A 30% raise made Ryan Powell less happy at work. Powell, a 38-year-old finance director for a manufacturer in western North Carolina, received that pay bump in 2022. He had been hoping for more based on the salary information he had heard from recruiters, peers in the industry, and his M.B.A. cohort.

The initial thrill of the raise lasted about three months, he said. “The further I got into it, the more I was realizing that I was anchored to the higher number.”

In CT magazine, Brad East reflects on Olympic athletes sharing their Christian testimony:

The opening ceremonies of the Olympics are extravagant celebrations of national glories and global unity. But if you watch past the opener to the 2024 Games themselves, you’ll notice an unusual pattern: Athletes are always talking about God. Athletes of every kind continuously gave God the credit, often in explicitly Christian terms.

For my money, US track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone won. After breaking the world record (again) for women’s 400-meter hurdles, she answered a reporter’s question this way: “Honestly—praise God. I was not expecting that, but he can do anything. Anything is possible in Christ. I’m just amazed, baffled, and in shock.” The reporter laughed nervously and moved on to the next qualifier.

It’s not news that athletes thank the Lord for their success. But watching these public displays of piety made me wonder: Why is this still normal? Unlike other events, like the Oscars, sporting events appear to be the last refuge of “acceptable” public faith in our secular culture. In a time when belief is belittled, ignored, or relegated to one’s private life, athletes are unapologetically faithful in public. But why?

The place to start, I think, is the nature of sports itself. Athletic discipline is rigorously controlled because, when the whistle blows, nothing is under control. It’s chaos, contingency, and chance all the way down. The skies fill with rain clouds; the court is slick with sweat; the track is spongy; your opponents are strategically unpredictable.

With good reason, therefore, athletes turn to God. None but God is sovereign. I can’t control the weather, but he can. I can’t stop my body from failing, but he can. Even the wind and the waves obey him (Matt. 8:27). Shouldn’t footballs and softballs obey him too?

For athletes, God isn’t just in charge of the moment. He’s the governor of history. This is true for all of us, at all times, but elite athletes are viscerally reminded of it with a frequency few of us experience.

It should come as no surprise, then, that a victorious athlete will speak of more than God answering a prayer. Sure, they may be caught up in the moment. Deep down, though, they’re expressing faith in divine providence. It’s one more way to be clear about control. None of us has it, because only God does, and the sooner one recognizes that, the sooner peace is possible when losing and real joy available when winning.

In a surprising turn of events, a real photograph entered into an AI-generated images category won a jury award but was later disqualified. Photographer Miles Astray submitted a photo of a headless flamingo on a beach to the 1839 Awards competition, judged by esteemed members from various prestigious institutions. His image, titled FLAMINGONE, won the bronze in the AI category and the People’s Choice Award. However, Astray revealed that the photo was real, leading to its disqualification.

Explaining his decision Astray, cited previous contest results. “After seeing recent instances of A.I. generated imagery outshining actual photos in competitions, it occurred to me that I could twist this story inside down and upside out the way only a human could and would, by submitting a real photo into an A.I. competition.”

Lily Fierman, director of Creative Resource Collective, appreciated Astray's message but upheld the disqualification: “Our contest categories are specifically defined to ensure fairness and clarity for all participants. Each category has distinct criteria that entrants’ images must meet.” Despite the disqualification, she acknowledged the importance of Astray’s statement and announced plans to collaborate with him on an editorial.

Astray supported the decision to disqualify his entry, praising Fierman and calling it “completely justified.” “Her words and take on the matter made my day more than any of the press articles that were published since.” In general, he seems to have no regrets about the AI stunt, given the overall positive response.

Astray said, “Winning over both the jury and the public with this picture, was not just a win for me but for many creatives out there.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Human creativity is a gift from a creative God. When we use our creativity, we're showing appreciation for this amazing gift. God gives a unique gift to each person that can’t be duplicated or manufactured artificially. Whether a student, a pastor, an artist, or business person, we can use AI as a helpful tool, but we should never short-circuit the creative process by relying completely on it.

How often do we as parents imagine our children playing a professional sport? Whether it is swimming, gymnastics, college football, or basketball, there is often the hope that our child will make the cut.

‌Youth sports is a big industry in the United States. The Aspen Institute says it is a “30-40 billion dollar,” industry. The average family spends around $883 a year to cover the costs of just one primary sport. We might ask "Is the cost worth the investment?"

‌The reality is that only 3% of High School basketball players will play at college level. And this number drops significantly further along the professional level.

‌According to the NCAA, “Only 0.02 to 0.03 percent of high school players end up playing in the NBA or WNBA.” Think about that number! That means out of 10,000 high school players only 1 or 2 will ever get the chance to play a professional sport.

‌Possible Preaching Angle:

It is so easy to get focused on the wrong goals. Matthew 25:14-30 makes clear that it is not the amount of the talent, but our attitude towards our gifts that is crucial. We each have been given at least one gift and different abilities. Jesus says do not look at what others do, instead make a difference with the talent you have been given.

Mike Tyson is one of the greatest boxers of all time. Over his career, “Iron Mike” had 50 wins, including 44 knockouts, and only six losses. Coming from a difficult childhood, during which he was surrounded by crime and poverty, he escaped his circumstances through a laser-like focus on his dream of athletic greatness. And he realized that dream in 1986 by becoming the world heavyweight champion at the age of 20.

Despite his success and fame, Tyson was dogged by crises, failed relationships, and legal troubles, including allegations of domestic violence and nearly three years in prison in the 1990s after he was convicted on a charge of rape. He achieved all his ambitions of riches and renown, but a happy life seemed to elude him.

This might seem ironic or contradictory to some. To Tyson, however, it was neither. “You almost have to give your happiness up to accomplish your goals,” he reflected in a 2020 interview.

That is what we might call the Tyson Paradox. Building a good life requires us to have goals that keep us focused, enthusiastic, and out of trouble. But actually, attaining those goals might not give us the payoff we imagined, and could in fact bring us misery. Although most of us will never see the highs and lows that Mike Tyson experienced, we can all easily fall into our own version of the same trap.

William Muir, a researcher at Purdue University, studies the productivity of chickens. He wants to know how to breed chickens that lay lots of eggs and create environments that foster greater productivity. To research how to make super chickens, he did an experiment.

Muir put chickens into two groups. One group contained normal, healthy chickens. He left them alone for six generations of a chicken’s life. Another, separate group included all the super chickens, those who are proven high producing egg layers. Muir also left them alone for six generations. He provided food, water, and a clean environment, but did nothing to influence the chickens egg laying.

At the end of the experiment, Muir discovered that the group of normal chickens were flourishing: they were laying more eggs per chicken than when the experiment started. In the group of super chickens, only three were left. They had pecked the others to death. The super chickens had laid more eggs through a strategy of suppressing other chickens’ productivity, by killing, or intimidating them, so they were unable to lay eggs.

Possible Preaching Angle

Competition; Leadership; Success - Leadership can fall into the same trap. We believe that if we find the right super chickens we will have success. We look for superstars. In our culture, and in our churches, we often create super chickens, because we desperately want success. We think it can come through one superstar leader.

A research study examined data from millions of plane flights to determine possible indicators for incidents of air rage—when passengers become unruly or violent in some way. The study found that flights that have a first class or business class cabin and a separate economy class section are more likely to report incidents of air rage than flights with only one class of seats.

The study also showed that when flights board from the rear of the aircraft, rather than inviting first class passengers aboard first, there were fewer incidences of unruly behavior. When people walk past passengers in the first class or business class cabin and see them swilling champagne and eating caviar, they feel as if they have been treated unequally and unjustly.

The envy and jealousy make passengers more prone to feel justified losing control and acting rudely or violently.

In an interview on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, actor Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight Schrute in the TV series The Office, said the following:

When I signed up for The Office, it’s like, “I want to buy a house.” I wasn’t thinking about giving laughter as a therapeutic remedy and a balm and a salve to a hurting populace … I spent several years really mostly unhappy because it wasn’t enough.

This is what I was looking at: I’m on a hit show, Emmy nominated every year, making lots of money working with Steve Carell, and Jenna Fisher, and John Krasinski … I’m on one of the great TV shows. People love it. I wasn’t enjoying it. I was thinking about, “Why am I not a movie star? Why am I not the next Jack Black or the next Will Ferrell? How come I can’t have a movie career?” (He explained later in the interview how he couldn’t stop chasing the dragon that is success.)

When I was on The Office, I was making hundreds of thousands. I wanted millions. I was a TV star, but I wanted to be a movie star. It was never enough. Humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years, and never enough has helped us as a species.

Work success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. That’s the gist of an article in The Wall Street Journal titled, “Is This It?’ When Success Isn’t Satisfying.” The article states:

You got the job, won the award, launched the new project to accolades. So why don’t you feel better? “You get the title and it’s, like, ‘Ugh. Is this it?’” says Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who leads a study on how people thrive.

Sometimes, getting the thing is just as delicious as we imagine. Other times, we climb and climb, only to be underwhelmed by what we find at the top: more work, political wrangling, the feeling of being a fraud. Or the success high wears off fast, replaced by that old panic we hoped the accomplishment would finally cure. Then we wonder: Where’s the next win?

We’re all sprinting on what psychologists call a hedonic treadmill. That is, we might get a hit of joy when we achieve something, but we eventually return to our baseline level of happiness (or unhappiness). Whatever heights we reach, we’re still, well, us.

The article quotes a man named Andy Dunn who sold his clothing line to Walmart for $310 million. Mr. Dunn, now 44, spent years strategizing and fantasizing about such a sale but says it was a mirage. Building the company brought him more happiness, he says, than the eventual payout. Dunn said, “From the outside, people think, ‘Oh, my God, amazing, [but] I learned that those are just illusory things.”

Miwa Sado, a reporter for NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, “died in the line of duty and her body was found with her mobile phone still clasped in her hand.” Doctors soon established that Miwa Sado died as a result of congenital heart failure. But following an investigation by Japan’s Ministry of Labor, the official cause of here death was changed to “karoshi”: death by overwork.

In the month preceding her death, Sado had clocked an exhausting 159 hours of official overtime. That was equivalent to working two full eight-hour shifts every weekday over a four-week period. Unofficially, the number of hours of overtime probably exceeded that.

For the last few decades, the world has watched as China became the world’s largest producer and exporter of manufactured goods. But one of the unintended consequences of this has been a surge in the number of people whose deaths have been attributed to overwork. In 2016, CCTV, the state broadcaster, which usually only resorts to hyperbole when they have good news to share, announced that more than half a million Chinese citizens die from overworking every year.

Many in China’s high technology sector now order their working lives according to the mantra “996.” The two 9s refer to the requirements to put in twelve-hour days, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and the 6 refers to the six days of the week that employees with ambitions to get anywhere are expected to be at their workstations.

Possible Preaching Angle:

There are so many people who overwork their entire lives. They may not suddenly die as poor Miwa did, but over the course of their lives, they do eventually work themselves “into” death by fixating on the wrong goal, and putting temporary gains over eternal rewards.

A recent news article featured the story of three restaurant-owning brothers in India who constantly compete and bicker for business.

B. Vivekanandhan, the 51-year-old owner of a popular restaurant called Moonrakers, competes fiercely for customers in this southern Indian holiday town. So fiercely, in fact, that fists have flown. His chief foes are his own flesh-and-blood. His older brother operates a seafood joint called Moonwalkers right across the street. Just down the same lane, his younger brother runs Moonrocks. The menus are nearly identical.

At one time, all three brothers and their families would sit down for dinner. The three brothers behind Moonrakers agree it began as a true family endeavor. No more. One of the brothers said, “When money comes, comes, comes, love goes away.”

A couple of times in 2020, two of the brothers brawled with each other in the street in front of befuddled customers. “Sometimes it’s like a street fight,” one brother said. “People say, ‘This is a complicated family. We just came down to eat.’”

It’s all proving baffling to tourists, who frequently are stopped on the street by two of the brothers who were giving pitches for their rival restaurants. One resident said she wanted to eat at the original Moonrakers, but was bewildered by the competing eateries. Her husband, who swore he had dined at Moonrakers years ago, was even more confused.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The church looks just as petty and ridiculous when we don’t walk in unity in Christ.

Mara Reinstein writes in Parade Magazine:

We met Steve Martin years ago as a banjo-playing comic with an arrow through his head singing "King Tut." He's now a movie star and serious musician as well. In an interview, he recalled the movie "Father of the Bride" beating every other movie at the box office and thinking, "Oh, this month it's my turn."

The interviewer followed-up, "Does it hurt when it's not your turn?" Steve answered, "Not anymore … you have to remember that there's always going to be somebody better than you and there's room for everybody. I'm also a musician … I work with a lot of bands. I always say, 'Don't be jealous of other bands. You're just going to eat yourself up and waste time and it will get you nowhere. So be inclusive and say, ‘Great job.’ It takes a while to learn to not take it all so seriously."

Possible Preaching Angle:

The world may not call jealousy and envy "sins" but it recognizes they create issues. He's right, isn't he? It does take a while to learn to let others be praised.

In the fall of 2022, the fishing world was rocked by a cheating scandal. It happened at the Lake Erie Walleye Trail tournament.

Jason Fischer, the director of the tournament, became suspicious when the five fish he estimated to be about four pounds each—or 20 pounds total—weighed in at nearly 34 pounds. Mr. Fischer inspected one of the walleyes and felt a hard object in its stomach that seemed unnatural. “It’s not like they’re eating rocks,” he said. He grabbed a knife and sliced open the fish as Jacob Runyan, one member of the two-person team that presented it for weighing, looked on. The next moments rocked the competitive fishing world.

“We got weights in fish!” Mr. Fischer shouted, holding up an egg-sized lead ball he plucked from the fish. He then spoke directly to Mr. Runyan as if he were an enraged umpire ejecting an unruly player. “Get outta here!” he shouted, interjecting the demand with an expletive. Members of the crowd accused the men of theft and demanded that the police be called.

Mr. Runyan and his teammate would have finished in first place and scored a prize of about $30,000, but they were disqualified after the lead ball—and subsequently several others—were discovered in the fish.

Cheating in competitive fishing is more common than many people think. There are many ways to cheat: have friends deliver pre-caught fish to them; fish in prohibited areas; put fish in cages before the competition; stuff them with ice, adding heft during the weigh-in that melts and leaves no evidence. In some of these tournaments, ounces can mean tens, or hundreds, of thousands of dollars.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Original sin, greed, and dishonesty permeate everything and everyone—even the world of professional fishing!

Christian Coleman is the reigning world champion in the men’s 100 meters. From time to time, strangers approach the 26-year-old Atlanta native with a proposition. He said, “People will look at me, like, ‘You’re Christian Coleman. Hey, you want to race?’ And I mean, like, we’re in the middle of the mall. It’s like, obviously not.”

It’s a remarkably common occurrence, top sprinters say. Against all odds, overconfident average citizens size up these singularly skilled and sculpted specimens and think they have a chance to win. The urge appears to be universal, spanning national boundaries and identities.

Karsten Warholm, the 26-year-old world record holder in the 400-meter hurdles, works out at an indoor public facility in Oslo, in his native Norway. Mr. Warholm recalled a training session when a man, not dressed in running clothes, asked him to race.

Mr. Warholm said, “I was like, ‘Sure,’ because I was going to do another run either way. Of course, I smoked him, obviously.” At the finish line, the man insisted he had a bad start. He wanted to race again, Mr. Warholm recalled, chuckling.

In February of 2022, Scottie Scheffler was a 25-year-old beginning his third full season on the PGA Tour, ranked 15th in the world. He was still seeking his first victory on the game’s top circuit. And on Sunday April 10, Scheffler became a Masters champion as well.

In a press conference after his victor, sporting his new green jacket, Scheffler was asked how he balances his desire to compete—which is fierce—without letting it define who he is as a person. Scheffler then opened up about his faith:

The reason why I play golf is I’m trying to glorify God and all that He’s done in my life. So, for me, my identity isn’t a golf score. Like my wife, Meredith, told me this morning, “If you win this golf tournament today, if you lose this golf tournament by 10 shots, if you never win another golf tournament again. I’m still going to love you, you’re still going to be the same person. Jesus loves you and nothing changes.” All I’m trying to do is glorify God and that’s why I’m here and that’s why I’m in [this] position.

Possible Preaching Angle:

No matter how successful we become, our identity is not tangled in our wins and losses. Our identity comes through Christ and bringing him glory.

A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found a massive shift in American values:

Two decades ago, Americans of various ages overwhelmingly said that patriotism, hard work, belief in God, and having children were the values most important to them. “Hard work” remains strong, but the other three values have dropped dramatically.

Among American teens:

95% say that finding a job or career they enjoy would be extremely or very important to them as an adult. 81% said that about “helping others in need.” 50% said “having a lot of money” would be important. 39% thought having children would be important.

For their part, many millennials are buying into the “work 80 hours a week for us because we’re changing the world” rhetoric popularized by Silicon Valley. But even those skeptical of it are working their tails off. As Anne Helen Petersen put it in a popular Buzzfeed article earlier this year: “We put up with companies treating us poorly because we don’t see another option. We don’t quit. We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig.”

An Atlantic article states, “The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves.”

But our desks were never meant to be our altars. This mismatch between expectations and reality is a recipe for severe disappointment, if not outright misery, and it might explain why rates of depression and anxiety in the US are “substantially higher” than they were in the 1980s.