Don't Humanize My Enemy

Last night HBO aired the last installment of its excellent series 24/7 Flyers Rangers.

As a passionate Rangers fan, I've hated the Flyers - their players and their fans - with the irrational hatred of a partisan for 3 decades.

Bobby clarke - the Broad Street bullies - Ed Snider - Peter LaViolette (a former Islander coach even) - in my book they all have horns and a tail.

And yet here on HBO we see them playing with their kids, cracking jokes and having fun like normal human beings.

My cartoon enemies have become little different than my heros.

And I hate that.

Don't humanize my enemies.

I need my enemies, I want my enemies, I love the fact that I can root passionately for my team knowing full well that we have the moral high ground - we are not only winning games against them - but doing the Lords work along the way by punishing the wicked.

You need look no further than the last 5 minutes of the Winter Classic to see just how wrong the flyers are. Somehow they cajoled the refs into making bad call after bad call - all in their favor. Clearly the work of a hated enemy.

So why this topic?

It dawned on my that if you read tech blogs and interviews with founders you get a general sense of niceness, wishing their competition well, complementing people on their technicall prowess or innovations.

you rarely see any mean side.

And yet the world is fiendishly competitive. The tech world even more so given the speed in which it moves.

I say let's get some nasty back in the business. Let's see the competitive fires burning. Let's hate our competitors the way I hate the Flyers (and Devil, Islanders, Penguins, etc...) Let's wish them less success than we have.

I may love the new Spotify, but in my heart, I'm rooting for my old friends at Pandora. Sure I think Rapleaf has some interesting tech, but I am invested in, and thus rooting for Fliptop - a Raptor portfolio investment.

Let's keep our enemies out there - cartoonishly large - hating them - and channeling our hatred into more innovation, more grit, more competitiveness. Hate that they do anything better than you. Learn from it - but hate it.