People often prioritize themselves when they assume the rewards are zero-sum. This is generally a mistake. If you’re an individual, you might try to hoard impact so only you can have it, but it is quite likely it takes four times as long to achieve when compared to working with just one additional person. Similarly, if you are a leader, you might try to build the largest team to demonstrate your ability to lead at scale, but take twice as long to achieve your goals because to get scale you traded off pace by incurring significant costs from coordination.
This myopic view is usually a defensive play after having witnessed a recent adverse event. For example: a peer advancing enough to feel like they may not be peers any more, someone taking credit for work that wasn’t theirs and benefiting from all the finite rewards, etc.
Even if these events are true (in many cases, we tell ourselves stories that are believable but untrue), I would resist the temptation to prioritize what is in one’s own interest and at the cost of the team or company. There are far more benefits to helping everyone you work with succeed: where you might normally have tried to keep a bigger slice of an existing pie for yourself, what if you instead made the pie bigger for everyone? Isn’t it more like that your slice of this bigger pie is already much bigger?
This is the general idea of Ship, Shipmates, Self, and it extends far beyond the navy. If you prioritize what is good for the ship, first and foremost, and then what might be good for your shipmates, it is likely your journey will yield you more benefit and fulfillment than if you only tried to prioritize yourself. This is hard to see in everyday metrics, but felt more easily on a longer time horizon. Paraphrasing @drgurner: A world that is generally focused about feeling good short-term creates exceptional rewards for the few that relentlessly pursue greatness long-term.
